Your fitness tracker encourages you to take 10,000 steps a day for better health. Science doesn't exactly support that. Today we're talking about the research around step counts and all-cause mortality.<br/>

Cancer is scary. And fear can lead us to try and find hope in some pretty dubious treatment suggestions. There's a myth circulating in internet health circles that eating a low-sugar diet can somehow starve the cancer and shrink tumors....

Can you really become allergic to red meat? Yes. Alpha-gal is a sugar molecule found in many mammals, including pigs, cattle, and lamb. And yes, it is possible for the human immune system to become reactive to alpha-gal, and growing...

May is mental health awareness month and in honor of that, we’re dedicating the next four episodes to different treatments for depression, a major mental health issue across the globe. We’ll cover medications – approved and unapproved –...

May is mental health month, and we're talking about treatments for depression. Today, we're looking at the evidence for using psilocybin mushrooms to treat depression. There's lots of studies to look at, so here we goooo!

Ketamine is a controlled substance approved by the FDA for use as an anesthetic. It is also used recreationally to create a dissociative state. But what about ketamine for depression? The FDA has approved Spravato (esketamine) for...

May is Mental Awareness Month, and today we're talking about Transcrainial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS). We'll look at how this treatment is administered, dive into the research on how effective this treatment is, compare the results to...

With support from the National Institute for Health Care Management, we’re spending the next three episodes talking about how drugs get approved in the United States. In this first episode, we discuss the drug approval process from the...

All drugs have to follow the same path to approval at the US Food and Drug Administration, except when they don't. Today, with the support of NIHCM, we're learning about the exceptions to the rules that can happen when drugs get...

The drug approval process in the United States is complicated. There are many stakeholders and varying agendas when bringing a drug to market, and profit motives often are as big a factor as helping patients. The loopholes and shortcuts...

Recently, a small trial of a drug for colorectal cancer saw a 100% remission rate. That means ALL the people in the study who received the drug experienced a remission of their cancer. It's a small trial, and more study is needed, but...

Gun violence is a public health problem, but we don’t approach it like one. The debate often gets framed as “guns or no guns” when it isn’t that black and white. In this episode we break down how and why to approach gun violence as a...

Health policies, including those related to abortion, should be guided by data. So what do the data have to say about restricting abortion access? How might it impact public health in the United States and what are some of the best ways...

The day has finally come: We have covid vaccines for kids under five. There are lots of questions and a few concerns. Let’s address them! <br/>

Insomnia is terrible, and it can be more prevalent among individuals with other psychiatric disorders. Treatment is available, but there can be a lot of barriers,. Medication is generally only a short term solution. There are proponents...

All this news about the Monkeypox virus as we’re still trying to grapple with Covid. What is Monkeypox, how is it treated, and who is at risk?

Pharmaceutical options for both emergency contraception and abortion are available to those who can get pregnant. In this episode we take a look at the availability of these medications, how they work, and the differences between them.

The Omicron variant of Covid-19 emerged a little while ago, and its latest variants are particularly contagious. It is currently the dominant strain of Covid 19 in the US. Why is it more contagious and what are we doing about it?

We’ve got another nutrition study making a splash in the media. This time we’ve got a combination of diet and exercise claims, complete with all our favorite things: Observational study, limited self-reports, and way too many factors to...

Racial disparities are rampant in healthcare. In addition to structural inequalities, the issues are partly due to racial bias among healthcare workers. These biases stem, in part, from the way race is presented in medical curricula.<br/>

Racial bias is pervasive in American medicine. Part of that can be attributed to the way we train doctors, and another part stems from WHO gets trained as doctors. The barriers to entering medical school and going on to become medical...

Condoms and vasectomies remain pretty much the extent of birth control options for people who produce sperm, and both have problems. So why is almost all hormonal birth control aimed at those with ovaries? There have been some successes...

A recent news story covered a study about processed foods and how eating those foods relates to cognitive decline. The only problem is, they didn't report on an actual published study. They reported on a pre-publication presentation at a...

The surprising approval of the extremely expensive and maybe not that effective drug Aduhelm has been dominating the conversation around Alzheimer's treatments in recent memory. Today, we're getting positive and talking about a very...