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Study: Beer's Taste Alone Gets People a Little High
Our bodies anticipate the effects of beer, releasing euphoric signals even before alcohol gets into our blood. Hence, "It's so good, once it hits your lips, it's so good."
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Medical Research Cuts Have Immediate Health Effects
The sequestration means many promising research trials will go unfunded. That immediately undermines a sense of hope for some patients with incurable conditions.
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In Boston, Psychological First Aid
A disaster-response behavioral health specialist discusses priorities.
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Meningitis Not 'a Gay Disease'
After the death of a homosexual man in West Hollywood this weekend, a city councilman conjured and addressed potential homophobic misunderstanding. Bacterial meningitis is an equal-opportunity pestilence.
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Marcelo del Pozo / Reuters The Case for Teaching Kids 'Vagina,' 'Penis,' and 'Vulva'
Sex-abuse prevention educators want children to understand that "private parts" are off limits to others. But they also want kids to be comfortable using what linguists call "standard" dialect for these parts, rather than euphemisms and colloquialisms.
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If More Funding Went to Safe, Legal Abortions, Would Kermit Gosnell Have Happened?
The poor women who landed on at the door of a doctor who allegedly performed late-term abortions would not have been shunted into that market if earlier services were safely and freely available.
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Are TV Doctors Doing Good?
It is valuable that basic health issues get exposure, though it seems the formula for a massive audience necessarily involves some degree of sensationalizing and emotional pandering.
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Bob Edwards, Father of Five Million
The Nobel laureate died yesterday at age 87, feted as the technological father of millions of babies around the world -- the oldest of whom is 36-year-old Louise Brown. He is responsible for in vitro fertilization, which in the 1970s was as controversial as embryonic stem cell research is today.
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Look How Quickly the U.S. Got Fat (1985-2010 Animated Map)
25 brief, delicious years
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Why Chemotherapy That Costs $70,000 in the U.S. Costs $2,500 in India
By rejecting patent applications, developing countries have kept down the costs of much-needed medications. Can they continue to do so without harming efforts to develop new drugs?
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Why Don't We Just Put IUDs in the Water?
By so many measures, intrauterine devices are the best form of birth control. Why are they still so rarely used?
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Study: Google Searches Reveal Mental Health Patterns
Search terms implied that people are 24 percent less likely to consider suicide in the summer, among other seasonal fluctuations that may be useful in epidemiology for illnesses that are difficult to track.
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How Price Transparency Could End Up Increasing Health-Care Costs
Cost/quality comparisons don't work in the same way for health care that they do for other big purchases.
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Morning-After Pills for All
A federal judge ruled this morning that emergency contraception should be available without prescription to women of all ages, calling years of delays in making it so "intolerable."
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Medicine by Text Message: Learning From the Developing World
Health communication systems designed for rural, developing countries -- where hospitals are often understaffed and transportation is inadequate -- are being adapted to improve care in U.S. cities.
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Medical Emergencies at 40,000 Feet
I have responded five times to "Is there a doctor on board the plane?" In three of the cases, it was a true emergency. Airline systems are woefully underprepared to deal with these situations. Here's what needs to change.
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Why Spend a Billion Dollars to Map the Human Brain?
Barack Obama announced an initiative yesterday that involves significant government investment in neuroscience. So begins the international race to understand the brain
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What Is Obamacare?
Just basics that everyone should know, though many don't
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What Does 'Married to Medicine' Say About Black Female Doctors?
Bravo's newest reality series uniquely focuses on African American women in medicine, but many see it as the opposite of "empowerment."
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Smokers Still Potentially Employable
Companies in 21 U.S. states can and do categorically refuse to hire people who smoke tobacco. Leading bioethicists today agreed with a majority of Americans that this is unethical.
