The fad du jour (and I defy you to find a non-du jour day) is something that sounds like an absolute win-win. It has all the correct buzzwords—green, sustainable, environmentally friendly, endocrine disruptors, bioaccumulation. And many more. Today it's buildings.

This is exactly what we at ACSH deal with every day in different forms. There is more than a passing similarity to the very successful promotion of organic foods, dietary supplements, and "chemical-free" (fill in the bank). This is because certain industries and trade groups take full advantage of the usual (but nonetheless effective) scare tactics and slight of hand to scare people into buying their products because of cleverly staged, feel-good, anti-scientific dogma.

2,500 years after acupuncture - inserting needles into the body to control energy flow - was first used by the ancient Chinese, it remains in the realm of alternative medicine.

Some people swear by it, just like some swear by Atkins Diets and homeopathy, but alternative medicine does not become real medicine unless it survives double-blind clinical trials, and acupuncture can't beat placebos in those. As a substitute, we get a meta-analysis of randomized, clinical trials. A new meta analysis in Menopause indicates that acupuncture can affect the severity and frequency of hot flashes for women in natural menopause.  

Hospice is the name for palliative care, primarily of terminally ill patients. There are few examples of more gracious, compassionate people, so if a patient wants antibiotics they are going to get them - even though there is little evidence that such medications improve symptoms or quality of life, and the downside is they may cause unwanted side effects.

Antibiotics are ingrained in contemporary medicine - they have saved an unknown number of lives, but in the hundreds of millions. 21 percent of patients being discharged from hospitals directly to a hospice program leave with a prescription for antibiotics, even though more than one fourth of them don't have a documented infection during their hospital admission.

 In the most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-5, the age of onset criterion for
attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
was changed from 7, where it was placed in DSM-IV, to 12.

The writers said they changed the age to reflect the importance of clinical presentation during childhood for accurate diagnosis, while also acknowledging the difficulties in establishing precise childhood onset retrospectively. A recent paper in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry says it has validated that decision.

Cancer, it is said, is nature's way of telling us to 'get the hint'. At a certain age, we all have more friends who get cancer. The older we get, the more often it happens. Even if we somehow slow aging, we would end up with cancer eventually, just like Gilles-Eric Séralini's experimental rats were predestined to get cancer when he let them live long enough.

Cancer is inevitable.

Perhaps not all cancer. The risk of developing several common cancers decreases with age, which has been a mystery. Mystery or not, it is what it is and researchers want to be able to take advantage of what they know. 

In today's Wall Street Journal, I have an article discussing recent problems in peer review.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is rightfully concerned that the U.S. faces “potentially catastrophic consequences” from the growing threat of antibiotic-resistant infections, which kill about 23,000 Americans a year.

One solution is personalized antibiotic therapy, but that would require both rapid bacterial identification and narrow-spectrum antibiotics. Tailored antibiotic therapy would not only extend the clinical lifetime of new antibiotics by better managing resistance, it might also revive old antibiotics that have been abandoned due to resistance, toxicity, or their inability to penetrate bacterial membranes.

Cachexia is a profound wasting of fat and muscle occurring in about half of all cancer patients, raising their risk of death.

Many strategies have been tried to reverse the condition, which may cause such frailty that patients can't endure potentially life-saving treatments, but none have had great success.

Researchers recently demonstrated that, in mice bearing lung tumors, their symptoms of cachexia improved or were prevented when given an antibody that blocked the effects of a protein, PTHrP, secreted by the tumor cells. PTHrP stands for parathyroid hormone-related protein, and is known to be released from many types of cancer cells.