It has been 13 years since the publication of the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) studies that examined the role of menopausal hormone replacement therapy (HRT) in prevention of cardiovascular disease. It can be argued that never before or since has a medical study generated such controversy by the media and scientific community.

To this day, the results are still being debated, reinterpreted and, in many cases, misinterpreted.

Most of us would choose to experience pleasure – however we may define it – as often as possible. The public health and criminal justice systems are set up by the government partly to shape how, when and where we find pleasure, so that we balance our enjoyment with working and paying taxes.

The more we learn about the problem of too much medicine and what’s driving it, the harder it seems to imagine effective solutions. Winding back unnecessary tests and treatments will require a raft of reforms across medical research, education and regulation.

But to enable those reforms to take root, we may need to cultivate a fundamental shift in our thinking about the limits of medicine.

It’s time to free ourselves from the dangerous fantasy that medical technology can deliver us from the realities of uncertainty, aging and death.

Loxo Oncology, Inc. and The University of Colorado Cancer Center today announced the publication of a research brief describing the first patient with a tropomyosin receptor kinase (TRK) fusion cancer enrolled in the Phase 1 dose escalation trial of LOXO-101, the only selective TRK inhibitor in clinical development. Additional contributors to the paper include the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health&Science University and Foundation Medicine, Inc. (Nasdaq:FMI).

How much does diet affect the cancer patient? Do "antioxidants" really play an important role in health - or are they causing more cancers than they cure? And what exactly is the relationship between obesity and cancer?

The latest Special Issue in ecancermedicalscience collects four original articles from experts in cancer and metabolism, addressing the hottest areas of research in this rapidly developing field.

"In our clinical practice, cancer patients often ask 'Doctor, is there something specific I should eat or avoid eating?'" says Guest Editor of this Special Issue, Dr Luca Mazzarella of the European Institute of Oncology, Milan, Italy.

Since 2010, the best estimate of the age of Earth’s magnetic field has been 3.45 billion years but new research says the magnetic field is far older. John Tarduno, a geophysicist at the University of Rochester and a leading expert on Earth’s magnetic field, and his team of researchers say they believe the Earth’s magnetic field is at least four billion years old.

Cancer can be caused solely by protein imbalances within cells, a study of ovarian cancer has found. The discovery is a major breakthrough because genetic aberrations have been seen as the main cause of almost all cancer. 

The odds of being attacked and castrated by a variety of parasitic flatworms increases for marine horn snails the farther they are found from the tropics. A Smithsonian-led research team discovered this exception to an otherwise globally observed pattern--usually biodiversity is greatest in the tropics and decreases toward the poles.

The study makes a case for using host-parasite relationships as a tool to understand why there are typically more species--and more interactions between species--in the tropics than anywhere else in the world.

For children with autism, early intervention is critical. Therapies and education – especially in the first two years of life – can facilitate a child’s social development, reduce familial stress and ultimately improve quality of life.

But while we can reliably diagnose autism spectrum disorder (ASD) at 24 months, most children are diagnosed much later.

Next time you are in your local grocery store, step in to look a little more closely at the beer cooler. Amid the brightly colored, creative packaging lies the final battle for the ultimate goal – your purchases.

But, what battles were fought to get the beer to that particular cooler? More importantly, what might those battles say about larger trends in business today?

At Miami University’s Farmer School of Business, we designed an experiential class to go in depth with these issues, leveraging the lessons of the beer industries as a way to better understand larger trends in business strategy and supply chains.

What can the beer industry teach us?