PeterUbel

Effective treatment + ineffective messenger = unnecessary deaths!

Those blood pressure pills could do more harm than good.

The novel coronavirus has decimated our economy at the same time as it has directly threatened our health. As if that weren’t bad enough, the economic damage Covid-19 is causing could have an indirect impact on our health. Consider what we already know about economic downturns and opioid overdoses. A research team led by Atheendar […]

It’s easy to think of good healthcare as being the key to a long, healthy life. But socioeconomic circumstances often play a far bigger role in life expectancy than access to high-quality healthcare. Consider the strong relationship between socioeconomic circumstances and life expectancy in Norway, a place where healthcare access is universal. Let’s start with money. People […]

The patient’s health was suffering because he couldn’t afford one of the cheapest, most effective medicines in the marketplace. He was coming back and forth to the Ann Arbor Veterans Affairs Medical Center for his care. His physician, an internal medicine trainee at the University of Michigan, tried everything in her power to help the […]

Ketones are a family of chemicals made by your liver, usually out of the body’s fat, to provide energy when you need it. Right now, you’ve almost certainly got some ketones circulating in your blood. If you fast for the better part of a day, the level of ketones in your blood will rise, as […]

Many of the front runners in the presidential campaign are octogenarians. President Trump, a virtual lock to be the Republican nominee, is 73 years old. Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden are 78 and 77, respectively. Which raises a question: if elected, how likely are they to survive a 4-year term in office? There’s no perfect […]

Many of us have been told that urine is normally sterile, meaning that if bacteria show up in, say, a routine urine test, there must be something wrong—we need to get rid of those bacteria. But as it turns out, in many people with asymptomatic bacteriuria—people who have bacteria in their urine but no symptoms […]

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is the number one cause of non-traumatic disability among young adults. MS is a chronic, incurable illness that destroys some of the body’s most basic neurological functions. Fortunately, there are now a slew of amazing medicines that often slow the disease considerably. These medicines can be the difference between whether or not a person […]

More than 13,000 American women were diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2018. More than 4,000 died from the disease that year. Those are tragic facts for lots of reasons, chief among them being that cervical cancer is often preventable. The good news is, there’s more ways to prevent cervical cancer than ever. (To read the […]