Doctors are upset about patients utilizing online stores to purchase prescription drugs, saying that it's like drive-through menu ordering, sometimes when the patients don't even know if they truly need the drugs or not. This is a legitimate concern, as doctors should be involved in helping patients make informed health decisions.
Gwyneth Paltrow's newsletter, Goop, and its nonsense ramblings has long been an irritation to me. The woman has no medical training and offers ludicrous advice, not to mention suggestions for everything from clothing to household items that are so costly they'd eat my whole check. Parks and Recreation has done incredible spoofs of her "work." She's competely out of touch with the rest of us "peasants," which makes her annoying at best, but now one of the pieces of advice that she gives her readers has led to the death of a woman.
Doctors are in such positions of power that it's difficult to think of them as victims of anything, let alone harassment, but it happens to women no matter their profession. Women in the medical field are also often likely to be lower down the food chain within the hierarchy, giving many higher-ups a sense of entitlement and power over them. A recent slew of doctors have come forward to share their #metoo moments and they are just as disturbing as any other women's stories.
Some of the best words in the world have no English translations. Take hygge, the Danish concept of comfort and coziness with loved ones. Don't you love it? In Japan, there is the concept of "forest medicine," which is simply healing yourself through the power of nature, wherever you are at.
When you are on the operating table, things can be very scary. Depending on what hospital you are in and which doctors you have, you may be reassured or experience record blood pressure. What if your doctors wrote their names on their caps for you? Would that help you put names to faces (or at least eyes) and feel a bit better about knowing people who are working on you?
Have you ever wondered why women remove their body hair? There's nothing wrong with it; in fact, it serves a lot of purposes, from carrying pheromones to aiding with sweat wicking and other functions. It's supposed to be there; why else would you grow it? But many women and men have a phobia of hair on women's bodies and it can be traced back to the shaving companies themselves.
The case of Michelle Carter, a young depressed woman who texted her depressed boyfriend and told him to kill himself, has the nation in an uproar calling for blood. Aside from the obvious dangerous implications this case can have on freedom of speech, its importance in terms of mental health and the effects of drug use to treat it have come under fire. While the woman, who was 17 when the boy she'd only met a few times killed himself, did receive a guilty sentence, many people are calling for her to spend the rest of her life behind bars.
A new study has been published that indicates that being an only child can change the structure of the brain. It's a small study and pretty much all studies need to be taken with a grain of salt these days (as do the media that reports on the studies!), but it's something that does make sense. According to the study, being an only child may make you more flexible in terms of thinking, a creative quality that may be reduced when you have siblings.
Can laughter really be used as medicine? Many people believe so, from those who engage in laughter on a daily basis as a way to relieve stress to those who enjoy practices like Laughter Yoga. Science has shown that laughter not only increases our immune cells and helps us fight infection, but it also triggers endorphins, which make us feel better. No matter what you think about laughing and cheesy comedians, they definitely have value within our lives.
With the first head transplant in the works, people are beginning to wonder just how long humans will be able to expand our life spans. It turns out that money is being poured into regenerative medicine research right now, with companies like Goldman Sachs investing hundreds of millions of dollars into the science to attempt to find some kind of fountain of youth.
