Can coffee help you live longer? If you drink coffee, I have some bad news and some good news. The bad news is that the more cups of coffee you drink, the higher your risk of dying early. The good news is that if you "risk adjust," then the more cups of coffee you drink, the lower your risk of dying early. Let me explain. According to a
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Brought to you by MedPage Today. 1. Gastric Band Not Best Choice for Christie? Gastric banding is the easiest bariatric procedure to fit into a patient's schedule -- which may be why it was N.J. governor Chris Christie's stomach-shrinking procedure of choice. 2. Inoculating Against Vaccine Fears? A new surveillance tool might help immunize communities against vaccine scares. 3. Wide Variation ...

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After a terribly painful and debilitating illness, Steve died.  He had been treated for Stage 2 Hodgkin’s Disease with a series of intense therapies including German enzymes, American antineoplastins, Mexican naturopathy and Chinese herbs, complemented by focused meditation, innumerable vitamins, extreme diet modification and acupuncture for severe pain.  He fought the cancer with every ounce of his being, doing everything to survive, except the one thing that had an 85% ...

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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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Text message: “John, This cough and congestion is killing me. It’s turning thick and green. Can you write me a Z-pak? It always works for me.” If you write a blog on medical decision-making and heart rhythm matters, it seems an incredible omission not to opine on the FDA warning concerning the commonly used antibiotic azithromycin (the drug in a Z-pak). Quoting directly from the FDA warning:

[Azithromycin] can cause ...

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Brought to you by MedPage Today. 1. Study Eases Some Azithromycin Fears. Danish patients taking azithromycin were at no greater risk of cardiovascular death, relative to those using penicillin, when pretreatment mortality risk was taken into account. 2. Study: Medicaid Expansion Won't Help All Aspects of Health. Expanding Medicaid coverage improves mental health but doesn't tackle some basic measures of physical health, like ...

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A high calcium diet and calcium supplementation: Is it bad for you? An article from Sweden was recently published showing that in a very large group of women, over 60,000 of them, followed for 19 years as part of an also very interesting study of the effectiveness of mammograms, women who get more calcium, in their diet or as supplements, had a higher risk of dying of anything, but especially of heart attacks. It is ...

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Where did the medical community get the idea that Vioxx, Trovan and Baycol were safe and the benefits of Prempro, Neurontin and bisphosphonates outweighed their risks? From research published in medical journals written by drug companies or drug-company funded authors. Scratch the surface of many blockbuster drugs that went on to be discredited, or even withdrawn as risks emerged, and an elaborate "publication plan" emerges, developed by ...

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As an addiction psychiatrist, I have seen marijuana do far more harm than good. So with the medical use of marijuana in Massachusetts now legal under state law, what should physicians do? Recently, I attended a chilling presentation from Dr. Kevin Hill, an addiction psychiatrist at McLean Hospital, at a meeting of the Massachusetts chapter of the American Society of Addiction Medicine on the topic “Medical Marijuana: What is the Proper ...

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Hi. I’m a 44-year old emergency physician. And I’m an addict. My addiction came to light when my Press Ganey scores plummeted after I started to stand up to the chronic pain and frequent ER patients. The fact that I have an addiction was reaffirmed when I went to my state’s Prescription Drug Abuse Summit. When I saw so many professionals from varying fields (medicine, law enforcement, pharmacy, education) assembled, I realized ...

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