CategoryMedicine and Health
European Court: Assisted Suicide Not a Human Right
The high court also ruled that refusing life-sustaining treatment is not the same thing as suicide
Don’t Believe in “International Community”? You’re Hardly Human!
Who said that? Not a streetcorner doomsday crank. No, it’s the editor of a highly respected medical journal
Tiny Dot of Human Brain Tissue Reveals Unexpected Insights
A speck of your brain can hold the data for 250 movies
Animals Using Healing Plants Is Old News, Says Classics Prof
Adrienne Mayor tells us that ancient and Indigenous peoples learned herbal medicine in part by observing animals
COVID Felled Both Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci as Heroes
As Wesley J. Smith recounts, more honest researchers were discredited for saying things that Fauci and Collins later admitted to be true
Woke Gobbledygook Now Passes for Erudition in Medical Journals
When science publications run policy bafflegab about healthcare reform instead of statements of hard facts about it— however dense they may be — science is the big loserThis article is reprinted from National Review with the permission of the author. Our most august medical journals are in danger of becoming more woke ideological-advocacy publications than disseminators of learned scientific studies. This is particularly true of the New England Journal of Medicine, which regularly publishes progressive gibberish pushing “equity” that is often nearly impossible to understand. Here’s the latest example. From “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize — Focusing on Health Care Equity”: We believe that health care–centric goals — equity in patient experience and clinical outcomes — should be the primary equity-related targets for clinicians, health care administrators, health plans, and payers. The health care sector is best positioned to improve the effectiveness and equity of the care it Read More ›
Orangutan heals wound using leaves — and triggers big media event
The orangutan is not the first or only animal to self-medicate. Birds and elephants do it too
Stem Cells Might Cure HIV?
We must always be cautious about stories touting biotechnological curesWe must always be cautious about stories touting biotechnological cures. There is a lot of hype out there, but this seems genuine. An HIV/blood-cancer patient seems to have gone into permanent remission thanks to adult stem cells. From the Daily Mail story: A California man is on the cusp of being declared cured of HIV and blood cancer. Paul Edmonds, 68, who made international headlines last year when he shared his story, still has no traces of either condition five years after being given a transplant of cells that rid his body of both diseases. In a new article by the medical team who treated him, doctors said he was officially cured of cancer and two years away from being declared cured of HIV — when he will have gone Read More ›
How to Protect Children in the Digital Age
We must empower parents to help their children navigate the digital landscape.
Are Near-Death Experiences Just Another Branch of Research Now?
We should hope so because there are a number of interesting allied research areas that would be better studied without preexisting prejudice against NDEs
Confronting IVF: Human Embryos Are Persons With a Right to Life
We humans are persons even when we are non-sentient and dependent on others
Neuroscientist: Human Brain More Complex Than the Models Show
The weird “homunculus” — the way the brain maps the body — was pioneer neurosurgeons’ best guess nearly a century ago
Are IVF Human Embryos “Children”? A Recent Court Decision
Neurologist Steven Novella claims that the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that they are “children” under the law “essentially referenced god”
Near Death: Why Corroborated NDEs Can’t Just Be Explained Away
In some cases, Gary Habermas recounts, patients who had NDEs while in a state of clinical death report dates and numbers that are later found to be accurate
Near-Death: What People Learn When They Are (Briefly) Dead
In this excerpt, Prof Gary Habermas reports that sometimes the returned experiencer says that someone else has died — but the official news only comes later
Prof: There’s a Growing Number of Verified Near-Death Experiences
Gary Habermas notes more than 110 NDEs where experiencers’ detailed reports of what they saw when they were flatlined have been corroborated later
Prehistoric Children with Down Syndrome Were Valued, Burials Show
The six found so far from one culture, identified by DNA evidence, did not live long but they were buried with grave goods
Palliative Care Doctor: What Dying Feels Like
Although a dying person tends to spend more and more time asleep or unconscious, there may be a surge of brain activity just before death
Book Banning Today: Silently … Not Like in the Old Days
Traditional anti-book banning groups are simply not where the action is and maybe don’t want to beLast week we looked at the way censorship in the age of the internet is typically invisible. It’s not the police raiding bookstores; it’s — for example — sudden downranking of posts so that information that might have reached millions of people reaches only dozens. Constantly suppressed, it can’t go viral. We can see the change more clearly if we look at the difference between how books (and other information) used to get banned and how they get banned today. Book banning before the internet When the word “book bans” is used today, it usually means something different from what it meant even a few decades ago. Ulysses, a groundbreaking work by Irish novelist James Joyce (1882–1941) was indeed banned Read More ›