A report in JAMA Internal Medicine highlights prevailing medical practices that should be “reconsidered” in 2018 based on the weight of evidence. The paper, appropriately, is written in the matter-of-fact style customary for the peer-reviewed literature. To some extent, that semblance of analytical calm belies the storm swirling between the lines of the report, and the mess it has long been making in the House of Medicine.
Amazingly, Thanksgiving Day has already come and gone. As I write this, then, the somewhat euphemistic “holiday season” has begun. In a bizarre testament to the priorities of our culture, many are spending Black Friday - rather than in cozy, familial repose - in full-contact, retail roller derby. We have convinced ourselves that the right digestif for our signature annual indulgence is combat with other shoppers to purchase things friends and relatives likely don’t need and often don’t want, obligating them to reciprocate in kind if only out of remorse. The Got Junk guys are presumably looking on with anticipatory glee, knowing their payday reliably follows.
Industry funding of research has always been a rather fraught topic. In the immediate aftermath of what we might reasonably call the “Coca-Cola calorie debacle,” or perhaps “GEBNgate,” it is all the more so. But in this domain, as in so many, the rush to summary judgment (in either direction) obliterates nuance fundamental to real understanding, and obscures a middle path conducive to important and even crucial advances.
We have all heard that eating fish is good for us, and the proposition is valid both empirically, and epidemiologically. But it begs a vital question just the same: good for us, compared to what?
In an article published in The Washington Post in November 2018, the author shared the horrific experiences of women being inseminated with their own doctor’s sperm instead of the sperm donor that the doctor had promised to procure. For at least one victim and her now adult child in Indiana, this reproductive scam felt like rape. The article observes that reproductive fraud is not an isolated event in one or two regions. No, it has occurred across the globe; women struggling with fertility and their children-to-be are exposed to unidentified illness, medical criminality and scandalous abuses of trust, identification, security and safety.
A high profile paper previously published in the highly prestigious journal, Nature, suggests that overwhelmingly, cancer results from “extrinsic factors,” namely behaviors and exposures, rather than the “intrinsic” transgressions of our chromosomes. The media response is a proclamation that no, cancer is not just about “bad luck.” So august a platform for so salient a proposition seems to demand a highly erudite response, and I’ve got just the one: duh.
Your body will do everything within its power to maintain balance to keep you alive.