When a pandemic is happening in real time, it's only possible to know in hindsight what was a successful mitigation strategy, what was hype to help a presidential candidate, or even what was suppressed for geopolitical interests.

There is no question mitigation was good, but political and corporate media pressure to keep the world locked down and terrified into 2022 was always immunologically suspect. Many lives their lost due to the pandemic, some lost their lives because it was suggested people should not seek medical care due to imagery of COVID bodies stacked in parking lots, but a whole lot of damage won't be known for a decade or more.

White environmentalists in rich European countries still maintain a kind of benevolent colonialism over Africa, telling those countries Europe won't buy their food unless they use no science in its production - while ignoring that organic farming for thousands of years in Africa showed why it is such a failure for anyone not born into a natural 'breadbasket' region.

A new study finds that while antidepressants reduce negative memories in individuals suffering from depression they may also be improving overall memory function.

But don't go all Ozempic and rush to find a boutique physician willing to prescribe them for you, no one knows how antidepressants work, even after 70 years in existence. Though they outperform placebos like supplements in GNC or other alternatives to medicine, alternative medicine is such a scam because the threshold for placebo is high. Antidepressants are far better than supplement alternatives even though they only work 50 percent of the time. That is why patients routinely have to try a few.

In the past, you may have seen various 'we detected X in urine' papers endorsed by suspect names like homeopathy believer Phil Landrigan and endorsed by organic industry apologist Chuck Benbrook.

What do such claims even mean? In science, nothing. We can detect anything in anything now, but groups like Heartland Health Research Alliance Ltd are prized by litigators who sue "at the drop of a rat" and need any detection in humans - bonus points if they can claim pregnant women - of any chemical that can kill a mouse at 10,000 times a real-world dose. Any reason to send a teary press release sent to the New York Times.(1)

The International Agency for Research on Cancer(IARC) was once so heralded in a field so rigorous and methodologically conservative that epidemiologists were last to accept a hereditary aspect of cancer. That's right, they didn't see enough evidence to think family history of cancer mattered, and only agreed when overwhelming data were found. They were so thorough that when they declared smoking caused cancer, Big Tobacco was doomed.

A recent analys if of primary care patients at Kaiser in Washington state, where recreational cannabis use is legal, found that addiction was common among patients who used it.

Moderate and severe cases were more prevalent among patients who reported recreational use. 

The cross-sectional study was 108,950 adult patients who completed routine cannabis screening from March 2019 to September 2019. Of those, 5,000 were selected for a confidential marijuana use survey using stratified random sampling for frequency of past-year use and race and ethnicity. Among 1,688 respondents, 1,463 reporting past 30-day cannabis use were included in the study.

The Indian Center for Theoretical Sciences is located in a rural area a few kilometers north of Bangalore, in southern India. Bangalore is a mid-sized city that saw a very big expansion in the past few years due to having become a center for the information technology in the country - with most of the big multinationals opening sections there. The rapid expansion increased the wealth of the middle class there (but remember, the middle class is the top 5% in India), but it also created stress to the traffic in the city, which is notoriously a plague there.
The campus of ICTS is very nice from an architectonic point of view, embedding nature in its buildings and trying to integrate the two realities. Below is a picture.

What if nearly everything that’s been written about this month’s Intergenerational Report is wrong?

I’ll explain. But first, here’s a sample of the headlines: “Young Australians at risk of a poorer future”, “Fewer workers to shoulder soaring income tax”, “Ageing population driving $140 billion blowout in spending”, and so on.

If you go to social media, you can see a lot of suspect claims about fad diets, unapproved medical devices, therapies, and conspiracy theories. Many of them have names with "Dr." attached.

How is the public to know a "Dr." may be a PhD or an EdD or an osteropath or someone else who didn't go to medical school and become an M.D.? How should physicians respond? From the years 1998 to 2021, coastal states in the US led America in vaccine denial, were doctors supposed to tell their patients they were stupid for believing vaccines cause autism?(1) 

With rampant inflation, an economy whose only baffling bragging right is that it gained back 80 percent of the jobs lost since the Biden administration began, and mortgage rates increasing the most since Jimmy Carter was president, calls are on to subsidize more housing for the poor.