Why Do We Get Sick? The New Science of Evolutionary Medicine
If you infect a rabbit with a virus or a bacterium, it’ll start to run a fever. Why? The surprising answer is that fever is not a disease; it’s a…
Share
Posts by tag
Medicine
14 posts
The Diminishing Returns of Reducing Medical Risk
In the United States, the issues that patients ask about during routine medical check-ups have been changing. Reports of physical symptoms like chest pain, shortness of breath and racing heartbeats…
Share
Unusual Bodies: A Conversation with Alice Dreger
In this episode of our Two for Tea podcast, editor-in-chief Iona Italia talks to researcher, journalist, historian of science and novelist Alice Dreger—one of the most fascinating polymaths among the current…
Share
The Pernicious Folly of Pursuing Zero Covid
I often return from my hospital rounds as an infectious disease consultant having seen zero COVID-19 patients. Over the past few months, this has become a common occurrence—not only when…
Share
Brain Enhancement: Is It Ethical?
Our scientific advancements have made it possible to alter brain function and to monitor and manipulate the human mind. Neurocognitive interventions can assist those who seek to regain normal brain…
Share
A Blood Alcohol Guessing Game and a False Accusation of Racism
A number of years ago, I worked as a low level emergency responder. When allegations surfaced in June that ER workers across British Columbia were playing a blood alcohol level…
Share
A First World Plague: Medical Error in the United States
Error and its more malignant cousin malpractice are quietly epidemic in the American medical industry. Read even a few of the chilling anecdotal reports that flood online forums and a…
Share
How the Push for “Cultural Competency” in Healthcare Can Harm Patients
Across healthcare organizations and educational institutions in the United States, an emphasis on the delivery of culturally competent healthcare, a term used to describe the provision of respectful healthcare for…
Share
The Need for Transparency in Drug Information
One of the few things Americans are united on is the need to curb the high cost of prescription drugs. Novartis recently made headlines, after a $2 million drug was…
Share
The Myth of the Natural
If you want people to buy your product just label it natural. If you want to disapprove of something just label it unnatural. Yet, to embrace the idea that everything…
Share
Reproductive Rights in the Transhuman Future
I was recently asked to film a talk by David Pearce, philosopher and co-founder of international transhumanist organization Humanity+. The presentation, entitled “Towards the Abolition of Suffering,” outlined a future…
Share
Aesthetic Norms, Germs and the Medicalization of Ugliness
Medicalization is the process of bringing social, legal or political problems under medical authority: this is how human problems become medical problems. The concept is typically used to refer to…
Share
No, You Don’t Have a Disorder. You Have Feelings
The London Times recently carried a story about an avalanche of self-harm among British school children. According to the article, “school nurses are dealing with panic attacks, self-cutting, overdoses and…
Share
“Nothing Human Is Foreign to Me”: On the Nobility of Science and the Humanistic Instinct
Only recently did I realize there was a word for the desire to understand and prevent disease, and, more generally, to help people flourish: humanism.
Share