Lung cancer causes more deaths in the United States, 160,000 estimated in 2012, than the next three most common cancers, colon, breast, and prostate, combined.
More than 1.6 million people worldwide were newly diagnosed with lung cancer, comprising 13% of all new cancer diagnoses, and 1.4 million died of lung cancer, which was 18% of all cancer deaths ...
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In recent times, it seems as though every newspaper or magazine with a dedicated health section has a focus on the perils of gluten and the benefits that come along with adhering to a gluten-free diet. Or better yet, each week brings a new celebrity touting the dangers of gluten, and how it is an unhealthy ingredient that should be avoided religiously. Is this truly sound advice?
As a practicing academic ...
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Wemberly worried about everything. Big things. Little things. And things in between.
–Wemberly Worried, Kevin Kenkes
The bottom line: you can add arsenic in rice to your long list of health risks you don’t need to worry about. And you can add Consumer Reports to your long list of media outlets that you can’t depend on for reliable health advice. Inaccuracy and breathless scaremongering ...
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One of the things about which I'm asked most commonly is calcium. Some of the confusion comes from the fact that our knowledge about calcium and health is evolving. A recent study showing that men who take calcium supplements have an increased risk of heart attacks is just the latest in an avalanche of sometimes conflicting information.
Here are a few of the questions I am most often asked ...
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Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians.
A 52-year-old man is evaluated for a 5-year history of gradually progressive left knee pain. He has 20 minutes of morning stiffness, which returns after prolonged inactivity. He has minimal to no pain at rest. He reports no clicking or locking of the knee. Over the past several months, the pain has limited his ...
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When should drivers retire from driving? This question is always difficult to answer. In our suburban car culture driving allows seniors to maintain their independence and prevents social isolation. However, at what point does it become unsafe for the elderly to drive and what are the risks?
One month ago my fit and about 80-year-old in-laws were involved in a serious car accident. A young ...
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Perhaps you already know the behind-closed-doors guiding principles of the news media, but if so, I suppose I'm a bit naïve in comparison. I thought they would be all about reliably reporting the news. Instead, I learned this guiding principle during my days working as an on-air contributor for ABC News' Good Morning America: "Comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable." This is by no means an ABC mantra; it's industry-wide. ...
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A common belief, even among doctors, is that almost no one succeeds in losing weight in the long term. And for almost two decades, I’ve counted myself among the skeptics, being able to tally on the fingers of one hand the number of my patients who’ve managed to do it—literally less than five out of multiple hundreds, if not a few thousand.
When I stumbled across the ideas put forth in ...
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I have been struggling with a certain degree of cognitive dissonance following the announcement this winter of a study in the New England Journal of Medicine on the efficacy of fecal transplants as a therapy for clostridium difficile (C. diff) infections. While the study is the first to demonstrate the effectiveness of fecal transplants in treating recurrent C. diff infections (15 of the 16 patients in the group were cured ...
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A guest column by the American Medical Association, exclusive to KevinMD.com.
While the patient populations of individual physician practices vary greatly, nearly all physicians – regardless of practice location or specialty – see patients who have diabetes or cardiovascular disease or are at risk for developing them. Because cardiovascular disease accounts for one third of all deaths in the U.S., and 100 ...
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"A comprehensive and extremely useful roadmap for doctors."
-Eric Topol, MD, author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine
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Past 6 Months
Dear lawmakers: This is what it’s like to be a doctor today
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