We're only two weeks into winter and a New York university is already declaring above-average temperatures in 2023 a result of global climate change. 

If you're holding back on revealing negative secrets about yourself, new survey results in a social psychology journal say you can relax; most people don't care.

When study participants pushed through fear to reveal a secret, those in whom they confided were significantly more charitable than they expected. This was a marketing experiment, not real life, but the authors say recipients appreciated the trust, honesty, and vulnerability needed to reveal secrets.

Here are some findings.

Bipolar disorder, a mental illness with both manic and depressed moods, is often resulting in earlier death than others, by up to 15 years. In two groups, people with bipolar disorder were four to six times more likely as people without the condition to die prematurely, while people who had ever smoked were about twice as likely to die prematurely than those who had never smoked – whether or not they had bipolar disorder.

When it comes to bipolar disorder, the differences in health and lifestyle change mortality a lot.

An examination of more than 300 sudden, unexpected deaths in young children, which usually occur during sleep,  commonly known as SIDS in babies or SUDC in toddlers, including extensive medical record analysis and video evidence donated by families to document the inexplicable deaths of seven toddlers between the ages of 1 and 3 finds they were potentially attributable to seizures. 

These seizures lasted less than 60 seconds and occurred within 30 minutes immediately prior to each child’s death, say the study authors.

Sepsis - blood poisoning - is a severe immunological overreaction to an infection, and hospitals can often be a cause rather than a solution. A guess by the World Health Organisation is that up to 20 percent of deaths worldwide have sepsis as a factor. A new analysis finds that up to 40 percent of people who don't die still can't return to work after two weeks.

2023 is over and I am looking back at my achievements and failures, to take stock and try to learn something from the matter. This blog looks like a reasonably good place for such an exercise, so I am writing here an inventory of what happened to me in the past 12 months. Sorry if this sounds very boring!

Everyone wants an easy solution to being more fit but the only thing easy is eating too much pizza. Since 2022 we've been treated to far too many pictures of celebrities with weird "Ozempic Face" because their vanity is stronger than their desire for energy balance.

You don't need a gimmick, you do need a little willpower. Commercial gyms love this time of year because everyone joins to honor their New Year's Resolution, they even pay stupid initiation fees, and then most are done a month later.

An easy way to save money on a gym membership, in order of difficulty:

One concern about the Affordable Care Act was that in providing access to 700,000 people that companies refused to insure, access would decline along with the surges in cost for everyone. That has turned out to be true in both cases. 

Some states have also 'bundled' behavioral and physical health care, and that hasn't improved access or care for people with mental health issues. It isn't worse, that is the good news, but for the 400 percent increase in cost it isn't better - and demand became higher due to heightened anxiety and depression rates during and post the COVID-19 pandemic.

Though every medical school and residency program has sexual harassment training and methods for reporting, over half of medical interns surveyed from June 2016 to June 2017 data in the Intern Health Study say they have experienced sexual harassment.

Self-reported demographic characteristics and survey were from June 2016 to June 2017 data in the Intern Health Study, an ongoing National Institutes of Health–funded repeated cohort study of postgraduate year 1 residents (interns) and the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC).

In some homes, it is believed that static electricity can lead to inferior grinding, and that has coffee connoisseurs searching for answers.

Will water help, or is it just making a mess because while a little may help, people will use too much? 

Coffee is prone to fads the way athletics - nasal strips, cryo-therapy, those weird blue-light filter glasses - and certainly nutrition is. A study may create a correlation and people sell a produce. Giving coffee acupuncture before tamping in espresso was all the rage starting in 2020 and for the last year some have sworn by adding water to reduce static electricity.