Almost everyone has experience with supplements—taking them, or watching others take them, to treat a variety of ailments or achieve other goals like improving their energy levels. People often take supplements to promote weight loss, improve their overall health, increase sexual performance, or to help ease specific medical conditions. Supplements Read more…
What are they and why are they important? You might not be familiar with the term, or know what it means, but you’ve almost certainly heard of some lipids, including cholesterol, fatty acids, and saturated fatty acids. Lipids are essential to human health. In the body, they perform various functions Read more…
Blood pressure describes the amount of force with which the blood pushes against the blood vessel walls. Systolic blood pressure (the first number) indicates how much pressure your blood is exerting against your artery walls when the heart beats. Diastolic blood pressure (the second number) indicates how much pressure your blood is Read more…
By now, pretty much everyone is aware that sometimes in medicine, treatments involve removing something from one person’s body and putting it in someone else’s. Organ transplants, blood transfusions, and bone marrow transfusions are probably the most well-known, but there’s another type of transplant that can help restore health–a fecal Read more…
Everyone knows that sleep is important. We all know the tired, gritty feeling of not getting enough of it. The feeling that you can barely keep your eyes open, that your mind is in a fog—that is sleep deprivation in a nutshell. Experts have warned that America is facing a Read more…
Inflammation is a process by which the body’s white blood cells and the substances they produce fight infections, heal injuries, and react against foreign bodies. Inflammation is caused by the immune system, and it is involved in the immune system’s regenerative and protective capabilities. If you get a shot or Read more…
Antibiotics are a medical miracle. They seem so routine now, but antibiotics are what make many of the things we take for granted possible. Even the simplest surgery could be fatal without them, since the risks of infection would be so high. Less than 100 years ago, catching pneumonia constituted Read more…
In the medical field, sometimes drugs that were developed to treat one condition may be used treat other conditions as well. In some cases, the drugs don’t even work for their original intended purpose. Famously, erectile dysfunction drug Viagra (sildenafil citrate) was originally intended to help reduce blood pressure. Scientists Read more…
By this point, everyone knows that exercise is good for you. It’s good for the young, the old, the healthy, the sick, the disabled—everyone. Most people, if you ask them, will spout off a number of reasons why exercise is good for you, ranging from weight loss to reducing the Read more…
California, my home state, leads the nation in one very important statistic: it has the lowest maternal mortality rate of any state in the U.S. Between 2006 and 2013, the maternal mortality rate in California fell by 55%. That’s excellent news, and it is a credit to our medical system, Read more…