• Artemisinin and the Battle for Understanding

      Just today researchers published a breakthrough in diabetes treatment – an active substance from the herb Qing hao. This substance, artemisinin, became famous when it was approved as a malaria treatment by the FDA, and was also indirectly given a nobel prize in 2015, for it’s “discovery”. The WHO mandates that artemisinin cannot be…

  • Losing our Minds

    Statin medications were approved for use in the US in 1987. Suggested guidelines from 2015 say that 56 million American adults, or almost half those age 40 to 75, should be advised to take statins. A large percentage, about half, of these do, providing revenues in the area of 30 billion a year. Although they…

  • Wetware vs. Leviathan

        Last week the future very suddenly took shape: IBM, DeepMind/Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon announced a partnership to explore the best practices for artificial intelligence – the Partnership on AI to benefit people and society. Of course organization is sorely needed in light of the ethical questions that arise out of the self-driving…

  • The Fat Hack

      Excess carbohydrates in the body are converted to fat – this is why eating too many carbs, not too much fat, makes you fat. Specifically, the carbs are converted to palmitic acid, or palmitate, a saturated fat also found in palm oil, soybean oil, and sunflower oil.   All three of these fats are widely,…

  • The Medicines of the Future

      A few years ago I was speaking with a drug researcher at UC Irvine who was looking for natural products (herbs, in Western parlance) that showed promise as cancer therapies. As I know a lot about herbs, I suggested I assist him in identifying targets, and in exchange he could help me do some…

  • Tamagotchi and the Urgent Need for Nutritional Medicine

      In the 1990s Akihiro Yokoi created a digital pet that was the biggest toy fad of that decade. The first 2 generations of this pet created unforeseen problems because there was no pause button, and if you didn’t continuously take care of the Tamagotchi, it would die in a day. Children and even adults…

  • A Case of Severe Nerve Pain

    A patient came to me in terrible pain, crying with frustration. She had recovered from a lumpectomy and removal of 26 lymph nodes, and suffered lymphedema in her left arm.   At some point during the surgery they had temporarily implanted a defibrillator. The 3-inch longitudinal scar just below the clavicle hurt more than anything from…

  • The Madrid Statement – 200 scientists in 38 countries sign statement to ban PFAs

    The Madrid Statement – http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/1509934/ – was published this week.  200 scientists from 38 countries signed this statement which essentially warns that PFAs, Teflon non-stick chemicals for example, are dangerous enough that they should be completely outlawed. It also reveals that DuPont chemicals knew this in 1961 and were actually fined by the EPA in…

  • Anti Aging – What you can do right now

    For many years Western science has known that dietary restriction lengthens life in all animals including mammals. At first it was thought that restricting calories was the key – limiting caloric intake to just enough so as not to suffer any malnutrition seemed to extend lifespan in worms and rodents up to 30%.   Small human…

  • False but happy memory implanted in sleeping mice – Rodent recall

    photo:  Chris Warbey via Guardian newspaper This is really interesting – animals, including humans, have a map of neurons that represent “place”.  By figuring out which neuron represented which place in a mouses brain, scientists attached an electrode to this single specific “place” neuron, and another in the reward center of the brain: Scientists have…