Dr. Mehmet Oz became famous thanks to a celebrity worship culture that progressives embraced in their desire to believe in alternatives to medicine. Just a few years after President Clinton trashed nuclear science in America, removed supplements from any real FDA oversight, and showed his love for alternatives to vaccines by throwing money that could have gone to science to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine so they could continue to find out placebos can't replace medicine, Oprah Winfrey turned Dr. Oz into a national sensation.

Sometimes people ask me if there is an evidence-based way to manage the stress of dealing with difficult relatives at Thanksgiving, and my short answer is "chloroform."

In modern hippie dippie wellness culture, that may not be the response people are seeking, they may want validation of essential oils or an app, but one thing most people don't realize is that stress is not about fads or even other people. We manage stress, we only think it manages us. 

This year, you're going to pay 24 percent more for a turkey, a tough bite out of the wallet for poor people and a dose of reality for economists and armchair pundits who claimed prior to today's "stagflation" that higher prices are no concern.

Imagine how much higher prices would be if food suffered the yield losses that occur without modern pesticides. This year I am thankful for my health and my family but also science. Outside my house are signs thanking healthcare workers, delivery people, and farmers - and if they made one for science, including vaccines and pesticides, I'd own it.

Recent survey results of 118 eight-to-twelve year-old children examined total hours of media consumed, hours of video game play, and number of media used concurrently. Then the authors correlated those to things like behavior, sleep, and psychological issues.

In 1958, shortly after passage of a misguided law related to chemicals and food - a problem that haunts trust in science like vaccines even today - America got its first government-created chemophobia craze. In cranberries.

The poorly worded Delaney Clause specified that any trace of an artificial chemical that had been linked to cancer - even if it was just epidemiological correlation or in a mouse and regardless of dose - had to be pulled from shelves. It was bizarre because the actual chemical did not matter, a natural version of the same chemical at 100X the dose was considered okay, it only mattered that it was artificial.(1)

Suicides and other mental health issues, as well as general deaths, went up during the pandemic in 2020 and veterans were not excluded. But they fared better than the general population, which is good news for Veteran's Day.