by James Hubbard, M.D., M.P.H.

A few days ago I started hearing a lot about the fat virus–not a new concept.  But all of a sudden, the news was on the radio, television, newspapers and Internet that a scientist had discovered that the adenovirus AD-36, which causes the common cold, might make you fat.  The hypothesis is the virus infects fats cells and makes them duplicate so, even without eating more, you gain fat.

I don’t think there was a new study or revelation, so why the big deal?

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by James Hubbard, M.D., M.P.H.

Have you seen the headlines? “Caffeinated co-eds hear voices,” “Heavy coffee drinkers more likely to hallucinate,” “Too much coffee can make you hallucinate and sense dead people say sleep experts. The equivalent of just seven cups of instant coffee a day is enough to trigger the weird responses.”  That’s about three cups of regular coffee per day.

It came to my attention when health writer Brian Newsome posted in the health blog of The Gazette, our local paper, “Move over LSD and step aside shrooms—Here comes coffee.” To his credit Brian was skeptical and, in fact, wrote a follow-up post with a link to Dr. Ben Goldacre, who criticized the study’s quality at his well-known website badscience.net.  (Dr. Goldacre evaluates the quality details of medical news, holding author’s and media reporter’s feet to the fire to get it right.)

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by James Hubbard, M.D., M.P.H.

A government survey recently revealed that 38 percent of adults and 12 percent of children used complementary or alternative medicine (CAM) in the U.S. in 2007.  But how did they define CAM? What is conventional medicine?  And why do people use CAM, anyway?

These and more answered by your favorite family doctor :).  OK, second best, I’ll give you my opinions.

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by James Hubbard, M.D., M.P.H.

You’ve seen plenty of products that advertise they’re “FDA-approved.”  What does that really mean?

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration wants you to know that all advertising is not as it seems.  Many products that say “FDA-approved” aren’t. Some are not even in the jurisdiction of the FDA to approve.  They couldn’t approve them if they wanted to.  Others can be “approved” before the FDA really knows much about them.  What about food and drugs?  The words are in the title of the agency so the FDA must approve them.

Well, not really.

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