Reflections

This Time, Five Years Ago…

By Erik Goldman

It was right about this time, five years ago. I woke up one morning with a raunchy cough, a head full of mucus, and an aching body that felt like a sack of potatoes. “This is weird,” I thought. I seldom get sick, and when I do it’s usually in the November-to-December transition when temperatures […]

Trump 2.0: Implications for Holistic Medicine

By Erik Goldman

Healthcare was not a high-priority campaign issue for either candidate in 2024. But Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, to head the Department of Health & Human Services, and Mehmet Oz, MD, to run Medicare and Medicaid, as well as his promises to tame drug costs, eliminate Medicare fraud, and “make America healthy […]

The Leapfrog Effect: New Tech Moves Tests, Treatments Out of the Clinic

By Erik Goldman

For a lot of people these days, medical clinics are no longer the center of the healthcare equation like they were in the past: their smartphones are now the point of focus. An astonishing number of medical tests, treatments, and services have jumped out of the clinic and into peoples’ daily lives via their computers, […]

In Memoriam: Gladys T. McGarey, MD (Nov 30, 1920 – Sept 28, 2024)

By Erik Goldman

The cosmologists tell us we are made of ‘star-stuff,’ that the elements and energies of which we are comprised have their origins in the sun. For most of us, that’s theoretical. But some people seem to embody this truth. Their very presence emanates a certain shine that illuminates and invigorates everyone and everything around them. […]

In Memoriam: Norman Shealy, MD

By Erik Goldman

“To me, everything is energy.” That’s the sort of statement one would expect from a shaman, or perhaps a theoretical physicist, not from a neurosurgeon. But Norman Shealy was not a typical neurosurgeon. Over a clinical and research career spanning nearly 70 years, Dr. Shealy challenged and expanded the boundaries of neuroscience in ways that […]

South Park’s Scathing Critique of US Healthcare

By Erik Goldman, Editor

The End of Obesity, a new episode of the viciously satirical cartoon series, South Park, is a merciless excoriation of American healthcare, one that has some physicians commenting that the show is more documentary than parody. Currently running exclusively on Paramount Plus, this latest installment of the long-running show centers on the rotund Eric Cartman, […]

Fraudulent Research Floods Nutrition Field, Corroding Credibility

By Erik Goldman, Editor

Good medical practice is based on trust. Patients trust that practitioners are knowledgeable, and that they use their knowledge intheir patients’ best interests. In turn, practitioners trust that researchers run their studies honestly, and that editors and peer-reviewers of the medical journals carefully scrutinize the papers they receive, sift out the garbage, and only publish […]

The Lancet Explores Medicine’s Most Shameful Chapter

By Erik Goldman

How did the most sophisticated and scientifically advanced medical system of its time become an agency of systematic state-sanctioned mass murder? It’s a question that haunts anyone who looks at the history of medicine during Germany’s Third Reich. And it is the subject of a comprehensive new report from The Lancet. Issued in early November, […]

Corporate Collusion & Wealth Concentration: How Healthcare Perpetuates Poverty

By Erik Goldman

Recently, The Guardian published a disturbing report about how North Carolina’s Atrium Health—the nation’s third largest non-profit healthcare system—was putting liens on the homes of people unable to pay their medical debts. There have been thousands of these cases, most involving people who have medical insurance, but whose benefit plans were inadequate to cover massive […]