The Week: Most Recent Health Posts

Why Portland refuses to fluoridate its drinking water

The Week — Wed, 22 May 2013 11:45:00 -0400

For people used to thinking of Portland as the earnestly quirky liberal oasis portrayed in Portlandia and the style pages of The New York Times, the idea that Oregon's largest city agrees with the conspiracy-minded John Birch Society about dosing citizens with fluoride may seem odd. But on Tuesday, for the fourth time since 1956, Portland voters rejected a plan to fluoridate the city's drinking water. As Slate's Jake Blumgart asks, "What's the matter with Portland?"

The vote wasn't even close: The anti-fluoride side won 60 percent to 40 percent. This despite the pro-fluoride side out-raising opponents...

WATCH: Stephen Colbert talks up the health benefits of marijuana

The Week — Wed, 22 May 2013 06:58:00 -0400

While his Comedy Central colleague Jon Stewart has been feasting off the scandal-palooza in Washington, Colbert Report host Stephen Colbert takes a break from politics to chew over some health news. After a requisite warning that his honorary doctorate in fine arts doesn't qualify him as a medical doctor, Colbert talks about the pros, cons, and profit-making potential of a new study showing that the benefits of laying out in the sun may trump the risk of skin cancer.

Colbert really hits his stride, however, when it comes to research suggesting that nature may have provided us with a miracle...

7 purported health benefits of drinking coffee

The Week — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:15:00 -0400

"Often people think of coffee just as a vehicle for caffeine," writes Dr. Rob van Dam of the Harvard School of Public Health. "But it's actually a very complex beverage," containing hundreds of different chemical compounds. Grown in more than 70 countries around the world, coffee has something of a contentious history with health experts, who have long cautioned that over-consumption may be detrimental to our health. More recent studies, however, paint a rosier picture for the Coffea plant's roasted berries (they're not actually beans), suggesting that when consumed in moderate amounts —...

The 'morning-after' pill: A guide

The Week — Sat, 18 May 2013 14:40:00 -0400

What is emergency contraception?
It's a means for preventing pregnancy after an episode of unprotected sex or sexual assault. Throughout the ages, women have resorted to various ineffective — and often desperate — methods to avoid pregnancy, from postcoital douching with Coca-Cola to drinking hot mercury. The search for a safer, more effective "morning-after" pill can be traced back to the 1920s, when veterinarians realized that a dose of estrogen could prevent pregnancy in female dogs and horses who had mated against their owners' wishes. Doctors adopted the use of estrogen to prevent...

Why is there so much poop in swimming pools?

The Week — Thu, 16 May 2013 21:45:00 -0400

Who would've guessed Caddy Shack would prove so prophetic?

A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that more than half of all public pools had tested positive for E. coli, the bacteria most commonly associated with fecal matter.

In the study, the CDC sampled water from filters in 161 public swimming pools, both indoor and outdoor, in the Atlanta, Ga., area. Of those samples, 58 percent showed signs of E. coli. Though the researchers could not definitively blame human waste for the results, they wrote that it "signifies that swimmers introduced fecal material into...

Your calorie-packed date night: By the numbers

The Week — Wed, 15 May 2013 09:25:00 -0400

Calorie counters may actually be better off at McDonald's than a sit-down restaurant, according to a new study from Tufts University.

It turns out, according to an analysis of the nutritional information of 157 meals from 33 independent, non-chain restaurants in the Boston area, that non-chain restaurants pack dinner plates with way too many calories. And you probably don't even know it. While McDonald's lists calorie counts on its menus, fancier sit-down restaurants are rarely as transparent.

Here, a roundup of some scary, appetite-suppressing numbers.

881
Calories in the...

How an Australian hospital is bringing clinically dead people back to life

The Week — Tue, 14 May 2013 14:35:00 -0400

Doctors at the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne have a knack for resurrection. Thanks to a combination of two resuscitation techniques, the Australian team has successfully revived three patients who were officially dead for between 40 and 60 minutes.

One of those patients was 39-year-old Colin Fielder, who suffered a heart attack last year. While being whisked away in the ambulance, he was asked which of the two nearby hospitals he preferred. "For some reason, I said the Alfred, which is pretty lucky because they are the only one that has it," Fielder said.

"It" is the AutoPulse, a portable CPR...

Why Angelina Jolie chose to have a preventative double mastectomy

The Week — Tue, 14 May 2013 09:50:00 -0400

In a New York Times op-ed today, Angelina Jolie revealed that she chose to undergo a preventative double mastectomy in February to dramatically minimize her risk of breast cancer back.

The 37-year-old actress, who had her breast tissue surgically removed, said that she had a "faulty" gene — BRCA1 — that "sharply" increased her risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer. Jolie said the gene runs in her family. "My mother fought cancer for almost a decade and died at 56," wrote Jolie. "She held out long enough to meet the first of her grandchildren and to hold them in her arms."

... More

The ecosystem inside you

The Week — Sat, 11 May 2013 11:00:00 -0400

Don't bacteria make people sick?
Many of them do, and antibiotics that kill them have saved countless lives. But over the past decade, researchers have discovered that the human body hosts 100 trillion mostly benign bacteria, which help digest food, program the immune system, prevent infection, and even influence mood and behavior. The bacteria living on and in us make up our "microbiome," an ecosystem that plays a role, scientists believe, in many conditions that genes and environmental factors alone can't explain, including obesity, autism, depression, asthma, and even cancer. The discovery of...

Owning pets may be good for your heart

The Week — Fri, 10 May 2013 15:07:00 -0400

An apple a day keeps the doctor away, but a dog could do even more.

Owning pets — and particularly dogs — has been linked to decreased risk of heart disease in humans, according to an American Heart Association statement published Thursday in the journal Circulation.

However, the AHA said the connection is not necessarily causal. "It may be simply that healthier people are the ones that have pets, not that having a pet actually leads to or causes reduction in cardiovascular risk," said Baylor professor Glenn N. Levine, M.D., who chaired the AHA committee that wrote the statement...

Is sun-tanning good for you, after all?

The Week — Wed, 08 May 2013 14:09:00 -0400

Finally, some good news for sun worshipers who have withstood years of warnings about the dangers of skin cancer. Researchers in Scotland have just released a study suggesting that the benefits of exposure to sunlight might outweigh the dangers. The news comes as the Food and Drug Administration proposes tighter regulations for tanning beds, with public health officials saying UV-based sun lamps can boost your risk of melanoma by 75 percent. How can a force with such potential for harm actually be good for you? Here's what you need to know:

How was the experiment conducted?
Dermatologists at the...

Why a joint replacement costs $30,000 in one hospital and $160,000 in another

The Week — Wed, 08 May 2013 11:50:00 -0400

If you need a lower joint replacement, Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington D.C. will charge you or your insurance provider an average of $30,000, according to The Washington Post. Across town at George Washington University, the same procedure will cost $69,000. And at Las Colinas Medical Center near Dallas? $160,832.

Those bewildering price differences were revealed by the Obama administration to reporters at The Washington Post, New York Times and Huffington Post. They represent what different hospitals charge Medicare for the exact same procedures — information the government has been...

The case for licking your baby's pacifier

The Week — Mon, 06 May 2013 10:05:00 -0400

Parents are used to getting conflicting information on, well, just about everything. To wit: For years, mothers and fathers have been warned against feeding their children from their own spoons, cleaning off a dropped pacifier with their mouths, or otherwise exposing a baby to parental saliva. And now, "new research may turn that thinking on its head," says Anahad O'Connor at The New York Times.

A study from Sweden's University of Gothenburg, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, found infants whose parents sucked on dirty pacifiers had fewer allergies than parents who only rinsed or boiled...

The alarming rise in the suicide rate: 5 shocking facts

The Week — Thu, 02 May 2013 20:54:00 -0400

The suicide rate among middle-aged Americans rose by 28 percent between 1999 and 2010, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report released today, the largest increase among any age group. The disturbing finding, researches say, suggests some of the focus on suicide prevention should be shifted to adults between 35 and 64 years old, among whom the suicide rate reached 17.6 deaths per 100,000 in 2010.

Here, 5 other key findings from the report:

Suicides outpace auto fatalities
There were more suicides than motor vehicle fatalities in 2009, a fact so shocking the CDC made that...

Does Oregon's Medicaid experiment discredit ObamaCare?

The Week — Thu, 02 May 2013 07:20:00 -0400

Two leading U.S. health economists published a study on Wednesday suggesting that providing low-income people with health insurance makes them happier but not much healthier. The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, is based on Oregon's limited expansion of Medicaid, and it dropped into the ongoing debate about ObamaCare like a ton of wonkish bricks.

Here's why the study is so important: In 2008, Oregon had enough money to enroll 10,000 low-income adults in Medicaid, but 90,000 eligible people applied. So Oregon held a lottery, bad news for 80,000 applicants but a gold...

4 bizarre plastic surgery trends that somehow exist

The Week — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 14:22:00 -0400

Plastic surgery is practically a rite of passage for our friends in South Korea, where everything from eyelid surgery to chin-shaving is affordable and fair game. In the U.S., it's a slightly different story, but anyone with deep insecurities and deep pocketbooks can easily go under the knife — or the laser, or the liposuction vacuum — to chase perfection in the mirror. And in recent years, plastic surgery has expanded beyond the traditional nose job or face lift. Here are four of the more questionable and painful-sounding plastic surgery "trends" of recent memory:

1. Arms like...