Selected Writings
Maclean's — February 14, 2012
He swept into the dimmed Sony Centre in Toronto, combing the crowd like an evangelical leader, and Science-ish half-expected audience members to fall down at his touch. But this was no high priest ready to encourage middle-aged men and women to start walking after being paralyzed or to see again after going blind. This was Dr. Mehmet Oz, here to give a motivational talk about the “biology of blubber” and weight loss…
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Tags:
Dr. Oz ,
HCG diet ,
Oprah ,
raspberry ketones ,
tv show
Maclean's — February 10, 2012
An aging population—or “gray tsunami”—is the shadow lurking in the background of health care, poised to drive up health-care spending and wipe out the system as we know it. Technology, on the other hand, is a means to improving efficiency in the system and reducing costs. Consider the early, sparkling promises of Obamacare south of the border or electronic health records in Canada. Policymakers trumpet this conventional wisdom—but it isn’t quite right.
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Tags:
aging population ,
austerity ,
gray tsunami ,
healthcare spending ,
physicians' pay ,
public spending ,
standard & poor's ,
technology
Maclean's — February 10, 2012
One in five of us has or will suffer from a mental illness: for years, we’ve peppered our news stories, health pamphlets, and advocacy campaigns with this statistic about the goings on in our heads. There are even entire mental health websites dedicated to it, such as OneInFive.ca courtesy of Dalhousie University. It’s a number that knows no boundaries. In the U.S., a new national report found that one-fifth of American adults experienced mental illness in the past year.
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Tags:
mental health ,
Mental illness ,
OneInFive ,
statistics
Maclean's — February 2, 2012
There were a couple of troubling reports about the use of prescription drugs to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder in children and youth this week. The Vancouver Sun reported “a striking increase” in the rate of second-generation antipsychotics prescribed to kids. South of the border, the New York Times ran a big op-ed entitled “Ritalin Gone Wrong,” in which a psychology professor rang alarm bells over the three million U.S. children who take stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall for “problems in focusing.” With more than 40 years of experience under his belt, the professor said “we should be asking why we rely so heavily on these drugs,” adding that few physicians and parents “seem to be aware of what we have been learning about the lack of effectiveness of these drugs.”…
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Tags:
ADHD ,
antipsychotics for children ,
New York Times ,
psychotropes ,
Ritalin ,
Time magazine
Maclean's — January 26, 2012
Culture writes on illness. That’s evident in the battle around a French documentary about autism entitled “Le Mur” or “The Wall.” Today, a court in the northern city Lille will decide whether the film, released online last year, should be censored at the request of psychoanalysts in the country, since it essentially charges that their approach to the disorder ignores decades of scientific progress. Continue…
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Tags:
autism ,
France ,
psychiatry ,
psychoanlsyis ,
talking cure
Maclean's — January 18, 2012
This past weekend, Science-ish was disappointed to read Margaret Wente’s column on health evidence, in which she opined: “Today’s health wisdom has a way of becoming tomorrow’s bunk… This may help explain why all the standard diet and exercise advice is worthless.” Sure, evidence about the best way to eat is evolving, the media screws up reporting on science all the time, and the health sciences are particularly vulnerable to what Edmonton-based health law professor Timothy Caulfield calls, in his insightful new book A Cure for Everything!, “an unprecedented number of perverting influences” like Big Food…
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Tags:
Atkins diet ,
Ben Goldacre ,
calories ,
diet ,
Margaret Wente ,
Rob Ford ,
Timothy Caulfield ,
weight loss
National Post — January 13, 2012
To read Timothy Caulfield’s The Cure for Everything! is to wonder how we are not all waddling around at 350 pounds, out-of-shape and sickly. Caulfield, an Edmonton-based health law professor, documents the alarming ways the simple truth about what makes us healthy is distorted by interest groups, from Big Food to Big Pharma, who unduly complicate our relationship with food and fitness…
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Tags:
Afterword ,
Guest Editors Tags: Book Reviews ,
Julia Belluz ,
medicine ,
Non-Fiction ,
science ,
The Cure For Everything! ,
Timothy Caulfield
Maclean's — January 12, 2011
Since December, health authorities around the world have been scrambling about what to do with women who have French-made Poly Implant Prosthesis (PIP) breast implants lodged in their bodies. After being approved for market, it recently emerged that PIP implants were filled with non-medical grade silicone—unbeknownst to regulators—and that their manufacturer had got rid of an outer skin to keep the implants from leaking and breaking. What’s science-ish about this?…
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Tags:
breast implants ,
France ,
Poly Implant Prosthesis ,
public health ,
silicone ,
UK ,
Wales ,
women