Tag: medicine

The case for coffee consumption

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2012/12/The-Case-for-Coffee-Consumption_01.mp3[/podcast]I first wrote about coffee in a science column back in the dawn of time, so long ago that it began, “Let’s get one thing straight.  I don’t drink coffee…” Since as I type this I am on my second…or maybe third… good-sized cup (oh, all right, mug) of the stuff, something has clearly changed …

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On the naming of drugs

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2012/01/The-Naming-of-Drugs.mp3[/podcast] If you take a prescription drug, you’ve probably said to your pharmacist something like this. “Hi, I need a refill of the hydro… chloro… thoro… acti… zine? Zanc? Something like that.” At which point the pharmacist manfully chokes back his laughter at your pharmaceutical phonetics phailure, tactfully supplies the actual name of the drug, …

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A treatment for Ebola?

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2010/06/A-Treatment-for-Ebola.mp3[/podcast] A few years ago I wrote several books for Enslow Publishers in New Jersey for a series called Diseases and People. I covered meningitis, arthritis, hemophilia…and Ebola. My most recent book for Enslow, Disease-Hunting Scientist, also talks about Ebola, and some of the scientists who travel to the sites of outbreaks to help with …

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Wooden bones

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2010/04/Wooden-Bones.mp3[/podcast] It’s easy to not think very much about your bones. After all, they’re securely hidden away inside your body; not visible, except as hard lumps beneath your skin. Funny thing, though: once you break one, it’s hard to think about anything else. When first I wrote about bones, back in a 1993 instalment of …

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I get a box full of disease detectives!

Oh, all right, not the actual detectives themselves, but my latest book from Enslow, Disease-Hunting Scientist: Careers Hunting Deadly Disease. That’s the cover at left. Here’s the blurb from the back: Working from high-tech labs in Canada or remote villages in Africa, epedemiologists travel the world trying to keep us safe from deadly diseases. Learn how …

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Stop that stretching!

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/07/Stretching.mp3[/podcast] There’s a perception that science is always reversing itself. If you don’t like what science has to say about, say, the health benefits or risks of a particular food (eggs, for example, or coffee), you only have to wait awhile until a contradictory study comes out. That’s because science progresses in fits and starts. …

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Disease-Hunting Scientist: Marta Guerra and Ebola

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/06/marta-guerra-and-ebola.mp3[/podcast] Here’s one last column condensed from a chapter in my new children’s book Disease-Hunting Scientist: Careers Hunting Deadly Diseases (Enslow Publishers): In the movie Outbreak, researchers from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have to figure out how to stop a kind …

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Disease-Hunting Scientists: Jonathan Epstein and the search for SARS

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/05/jonathan-epstein-and-sars.mp3[/podcast] My next book, due out this summer from Enslow Publishers, is entitled Disease-Hunting Scientist: Careers Hunting Deadly Diseases. Each of its chapters focuses on one particular scientist whose work is related to hunting disease. The chapters are much longer than these science columns, but I thought in honour of the book’s release, I’d try …

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An instantaneous, universal, programmable vaccine?

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/a-universal-instant-vaccine.mp3[/podcast] Efforts to immunize people against disease go back to at least 600 B.C., when the Chinese attempted to immunize people against smallpox by putting smallpox material in their nostrils (the permitting of which, I would think, would require a great deal of faith in your doctor). Modern immunization began in 1796 when a British …

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The old gray hair, she ain’t what she used to be

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/gray-hair.mp3[/podcast] Look, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you’re growing older. Every second. Even worse, so am I. There are many manifestations of the aging process, most of which are far too depressing to go into, especially on a morning in late February. Still, we must all face facts …

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Myths of the season

If there’s one thing science has taught us, it’s that just because “everybody knows” something is true, that doesn’t mean it’s true. Just in time for Christmas, two doctors, Aaron Carroll and Rachel Vreeman, both associate professors of pediatrics at Indiana University and practicing pediatricians at Riley Hospital for Children, have published a study taking …

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Seizing appetite by the NAPE

’Tis the season to begin newspaper columns with the phrase “’Tis the season,” and who am I to resist? Failing to resist that particular temptation is of little moment, of course. Failing to resist another temptation endemic to this time of year is not: the temptation to eat…and eat…and eat. Why do we eat more …

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