In the pop culture world of mainstream media, magic bullets are common. Every week there is a new miracle vegetable and then the following work there will be scare journalism about some chemical.

In the world of magic bullets, smoking causes lung cancer. Yet science knows that a risk factor is not genetic determinism. If lung cancer among non-smokers were itemized separately from smokers, it would be in the top 10 killers all on its own, and shockingly few smokers get lung cancer compared to the hundred million who are smoking just in America.

Do you prefer to own a DVD, rather than wondering if Netflix will remove whatever show you wanted to watch this week? If you buy or rent, rather than streaming, you are contributing to billions of tons of carbon going into the atmosphere.

Photographers like Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, and Martin Schoeller made their reputations with distinctive visual styles that sometimes required the careful control of lighting possible only in the studio.

I may have once endorsed Eckhart Tolle by pointing out similarities between Tolle and Muho. Muho wrote to me that he does not know why his own meditative practice worked for him. In my eyes, such honesty and awareness about uncertainty are consistent with Zen. Tolle effectively* claims his way as the only true way for everybody.

(* "effectively" means that he does not claim so explicitly, but in effect, "effectively")

2.1 billion people, nearly 30% of the world's population, are overweight, according to a new analysis of data from 188 countries. 

In 1980, the world was still worried about doomsday prophets and a population bomb that would lead to mass starvation, wars over food, and a world government to mandate abortion; instead, agricultural science has grown so much more food that many poor people can afford to eat like royalty and get fat.

Cheap, plentiful food is a win for the world but now we have a major public health epidemic in both the developed and the developing world. 

A multi-institutional team of researchers has pinpointed exactly what goes wrong when chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) patients develop resistance to ibrutinib, a highly effective, precisely targeted anti-cancer drug. In a correspondence published online May 28 in the New England Journal of Medicine, they show how the mutation triggers resistance. Their finding could guide development of new agents to treat drug-resistant disease.

Ibrutinib received accelerated approval from the Food and Drug Administration for use in chronic lymphocytic leukemia in February. It has revolutionized treatment, transforming CLL from a deadly disease to a chronic one. But about eight percent of patients develop resistance to this lifesaving drug.

Circumcision is performed for various reasons, including those that are based on religion, aesthetics, or health, but a paper
in BJU International adds to a growing list of advantages to circumcision; it finds rhat the procedure may help prevent prostate cancer in some men.  

Black trauma patients over the age of 65 are 20 percent less likely to die than white seniors, according to a report in JAMA Surgery.

A nationwide survey indicates that heroin users are attracted to heroin not only for the high, but because it is less expensive and easier to get than prescription painkillers.

Most physicians would choose a do-not-resuscitate or "no code" status for themselves when they are terminally ill, yet they tend to pursue aggressive, life-prolonging treatment for patients facing the same prognosis.

Hypocritical? No, Hippocratic. 

Is that a good thing? You betcha.

V.J. Periyakoil, MD, clinical associate professor of medicine at 
Stanford University Medical Center
and lead author of the paper, says it is a disconnect, but to the public it isn't.  Making a personal choice is one thing, making a social authoritarian decision for a patient is quite another.