The People's Pharmacy

Research over the past few decades has revealed that we humans host a bewildering variety of invisible creatures, our microbiota. We can almost envision the collective genome of all these microbes, the microbiome, as a sort of second genome for human individuals. Unlike our human genome, the microbiome can be altered based on our diet […]

Have you ever put mushrooms in a salad? Might you add them to an appetizer? Stir-fries and frittatas with mushrooms are no longer surprising. Which mushrooms would you select for those dishes? You can find out in a gorgeous cookbook called The Fantastic Fungi Community Cookbook. Editor Eugenia Bone describes her fascination with fungi and […]

The COVID-19 pandemic has been dragging on for longer than most people imagined possible. With each new variant, cases surge and people need to make complex risk calculations about school, work and social interactions. Needless to say, all this can create a great deal of anxiety. Health care workers are under enormous strain. So are […]

We have heard that some people used their time locked down at home during the pandemic to clean out their closets and clear away the clutter. For others, though, we suspect that such projects would have been overwhelming or possibly even undesirable. Perhaps you know someone with hoarding symptoms such as excessive acquiring activities, difficulty […]

More Americans are living to old ages, but frequently their later years are plagued with chronic diseases. Is there a way to stay healthy into the ninth and tenth decade of life? To find out, we take a virtual trip to visit centenarians in a remote village in southern China. Visit to Longevity Village: Dr. […]

Can you have too much togetherness? After a year of pandemic restrictions that kept many couples cooped up together for months, some have discovered that minor annoyances loom larger. Couples have had to negotiate their roles and responsibilities more intensely than ever. This has put quite a strain on some relationships. Pre-existing problems have been […]

Almost thirty years ago, Laurie Garrett published The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. In this thorough, carefully researched analysis, she laid out why public health authorities should be watching for new pathogens and how they should respond if that happened. Since then, of course, a number of bacteria and […]

In September, more than 200 top medical journals around the world took the unprecedented step of publishing the same editorial. It was “Call for Emergency Action to Limit Global Temperature Increases, Restore Biodiversity, and Protect Health.”  In it, editors of various journals identify climate change as the greatest threat to global health. As a consequence, […]

Doctors rarely study spontaneous remissions from serious diseases. Why not? They are unpredictable, for one thing. For another, they are said to be exceedingly rare. Despite this, Dr. Jeffrey Rediger has found that most of his colleagues are aware of at least one case that defies explanation by conventional science. He set out to learn […]

Before this pandemic began, a small group of researchers were already paying close attention to coronaviruses and their potential for causing serious illness. Virus experts around the world recognized our guest, Dr. Ralph Baric, as the coronavirus hunter for his outstanding work in this area. In this episode, he joins us to discuss the future […]

The COVID-19 pandemic has been overwhelming, not only in terms of the huge numbers of people who have gotten sick or died. We have also been engulfed with information about the virus, the infection, the risk factors, what we should do and what we can expect. Much of this information has been contradictory. We turn […]

Everyone gets excited about the idea of medical breakthroughs. Fewer of us, if we are honest, are anxious to be the first one to benefit. After all, if you are the first, you know nothing about the potential harms, and neither does the person offering you the experience. Medical innovation is necessarily fraught with uncertainty. […]

Over the last year and a half, while the nation endured a terrible pandemic, patients with COVID-19 were treated even if they couldn’t foot the bills themselves. Will the high cost of COVID break the bank? Now that people will end up paying for treatment out of their own pockets, will more Americans than ever […]

How do you decide what you should do in a health crisis? Over the past year and a half, many people have faced this problem. Do you go to the hospital for treatment in the midst of a pandemic? What medications or supplements might be helpful and which are more likely to be harmful? We […]

When the COVID pandemic began, doctors thought that patients either recovered fairly quickly or they died. Before long, though, some patients identified themselves as “long haulers” because they were suffering debilitating symptoms for months after their diagnoses, neither dying nor recovering. There are people who become short of breath just walking up a few steps, […]