The Greeks are credited with being the first to practice “science-based medicine and effective pharmacy around the 5th century BC. The first pharmacopoeia had a list of 600 drugs and how to acquire and prepare the ingredients. New evidence is emerging that the Egyptians during the time of the pharaohs knew about pharmacy. The biggest …
It seems like every couple of years there is a major injury to a football player that results in either permanent disability or occasionally death. Any such injury should not be acceptable. However, when compared to injuries 100 years ago we can see that there has been great advances in safety of the player. In …
Probably the first thing that comes to your mind when you here these two words are kids either doing drug or having sex. But this particular entry has to do with parents innately knowing when something is wrong with the health of their child. I was recently reading an article in a medical journal about …
About a hundred years ago John Harvey Kellogg persuaded a great number of fluent and well educated Americans to sign themselves into his sanitarium at battle Creek, Michigan. Here they were submitted to a regime that included all-grape diets and almost hourly Bulgarian yogurt enemas and of course whole grains. At this same time millions …
Towards the end of last year there were articles appearing in the press about how the incidence of cancer was decreasing. President Bush went to the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to publicly take credit for the one half of one percent drop. But what the NCI won’t tell you is that the Veterans Administration has …
The following amusing article appeared in JAMA 100 years ago. The author was poking fun at how newspapers will run stories like this whenever news becomes scarce and copy hard to get. “In the Chicago Record-Herald, Oct 1, 1907, appears a special telegram from Wheeling, W.Va., according to which Mrs. Fred Harzell was the young …
Going to medical school was both challenging and exhilarating. Although I have many memories one particular one stands out clearly in my mind as though it happened yesterday. As freshmen medical students we were divided up alphabetically into groups of 4 and assigned to a specific table with a cadaver zipped up inside a body …
TOver the years there has been quite a lot of publicity on the amount of salt that Americans consume and the health problems attributed to this high salt intake. However, there is another side to salt that is seldom mentioned. Dr. Jacques Loeb (1859-1924) proved through experiments that industrial-grade sea salt solution (at the same concentration …
In a study comparing the effectiveness of Arnica gel verses ibuprofen felt for osteoarthritis, more patients testing Arnica gel (64%) saw improvement than those testing ibuprofen gel (58.8%). This was a randomized, double-blind study in which the 204 participants had radiological studies that confirmed the presence of osteoarthritis. The conclusion of the 20 Swiss doctors …
This past year there has been a lot of buzz in the news about the latest vaccine for the prevention of cervical cancer. And of course the question is, do our daughters need it? Let’s look at some facts. About 13% of American women are currently infected with human papilloma virus (HPV). There are only …