The Daily HIT

Last week, efforts by some Australian scientists to pressure universities in that nation to eliminate complementary and alternative programs garnered wide press attention. Some Australian universities offer degree programs in chiropractic, osteopathy and acupuncture and Oriental medicine. In today’s New York Times, the first story I’ve seen wherethe universities reply: Macquarie University, which is in [...]

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Not exactly a major surprise, as noted here by Marion Nestle in her Food Politics blog. A new diet study just out from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition went to a lot of trouble to prove the obvious.  When it comes to weight loss, how much you eat matters more than the proportion of [...]

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I come from a family where music was a major part of our lives from Day 1, so this was a pleasure for me to read. Age-related delays in neural timing are not inevitable and can be avoided or offset with musical training, according to a new study from Northwestern University. The study is the first [...]

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A report that I co-authored has just been released by the Integrated Healthcare Policy Consortium. From my end, this was a labor of love, done in concert with people whose vision and talents I greatly respect. Here’s the story, as described by John Weeks in a new article at the Huffington Post. Integrative health care [...]

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This article explains the new British Medical Journal study demonstrating the extent to which drug companies are able to suppress negative studies about their products, while allowing positive studies to be published. Shockingly and illegally, this even includes federally funded research. Drug research, even from clinical trials sponsored by the federal government, routinely is suppressed, [...]

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A healthy trend, which needs more rather than less assistance from federal health agencies and the USDA. It’s easy enough to round up the usual suspects, which is what a story in the Daily Livestock Report did last month. It blames the decline on growing exports, which make less meat available for Americans to buy. It [...]

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From yesterday’s New York Times: Seeing a chiropractor or engaging in light exercise relieves neck pain more effectively than relying on pain medication, new research shows. The new study is one of the few head-to-head comparisons of various treatments for neck pain, a problem that affects three quarters of Americans at some point in their [...]

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This story adds to a steadily growing body of research on the health benefits of mindfulness based stress reduction. An intervention aimed at helping patients accept the pain and disability associated with rheumatoid arthritis, while at the same time blocking negative thoughts and anxiety about their condition, reduced patients’ depression and improved coping skills, researchers [...]

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Posted without comment, other than to say that a therapy’s clinical effectiveness is not necessarily proportional to its degree of high technology. A week of wound debridement using maggots cleared necrotic tissue more effectively than conventional debridement in patients with chronic venous ulcers, a randomized French study showed. At day eight of treatment, the percentage [...]

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A thought provoking question … this is not news to those who follow health policy but it is something that will surprise many people, including some health practitioners. How can this be? The idea that prevention saves money feels intuitive. “When we think of prevention, we tend to think of the individual who benefited,” Russell [...]

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