Free Republic

Dr. Jay Friedman relishes his role as dental outcast. Like a pesky younger brother who enjoys watching his siblings squirm, the 86-year-old dentist and public health advocate has for decades been poking and prodding at the oral health community over his personal obsession: wisdom teeth. Friedman has argued for more than 30 years that removing a young person's healthy wisdom teeth -- called "third molars" by professionals -- is an unnecessary and irresponsible practice. While many dentists and oral surgeons have dismissed him as a traitor and a zealot, in 2007, people in the public health arena began to listen....

Geron Corp confirmed it will discontinue development of an experimental drug to treat cancer that has spread to the brain from elsewhere in the body and also cut about 40 percent of its workforce, after patients failed to respond to the drug in a mid-stage study. The company said it will now focus on the development of another drug candidate, imetelstat, as a treatment for blood cancers and some types of solid tumors. The brain cancer drug, GRN1005 and imetelstat's development in blood cancers were the only hopes that Geron's shareholders had after the company warned investors in September that...

And so the government takeover of our health care system begins: Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, plans to begin denying health insurance to newly hired employees who work fewer than 30 hours a week.. ... By making the fine for not providing health care cheaper than providing health care, this was always the plan: to encourage employers to send us to the government. Remember how Obama's big ObamaCare sell was, "You get to keep the health insurance you have"? It was all a lie, a hustle, a con, a ruse…

Each year, Congress holds a sword of Damocles over the heads of the medical profession. The "doc fix" is a budget adjustment to bring Medicare fees into the world of reality. democrats love to omit it for the sake of appearances. Obamacare cuts $716 billion from Medicare. Obama calls it "waste." Physicians call it reimbursement. What that will do is make finding Medicare providers far more difficult. The AMA supported Obamacare, on the promise that the law would include a permanent “doc fix.” But Democrats reneged on that promise, owing to the cost of a permanent SGR adjustment: something on...

Former President George H.W. Bush is in the hospital, the Houston Chronicle reported Thursday. Bush, 88, is at Houston’s Methodist Hospital receiving treatment for a “chronic cough,” his chief of staff, Jean Becker, told the Chronicle.

Countries using high-fructose corn syrup have diabetes rates 20 percent higher than countries that do not, a new international analysis finds. High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in national food supplies around the world might help explain the rising rates of type 2 diabetes around the world, researchers at the University of Southern California and the University of Oxford report in the journal Global Public Health. After studying 42 countries, researchers found that those that use HFCS in their food supply had a 20 percent higher prevalence of diabetes than those that did not use HFCS, suggesting an association with diabetes independent...

The Obama Administration is continuing its push to expand citizen access to health care--and it now seeks to accomplish that task on behalf of the citizens of Uganda. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) acknowledged this morning that soon it will seek a contractor to run its new Ugandan health program. According to a presolicitation notice released today that U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor located via routine database research, USAID around Dec. 20 will release a Request for Proposals for the endeavor. The stated intermediate goals of the initiative are: 1) Expanded availability of health services by private service...

Obama’s former chief economist Larry Summers thinks that one way to break America’s fall off the over-reported fiscal cliff is to raise taxes to the level they were under Clinton’s administration. Echoing Paul Krugman’s 90% tax rate nostalgia and pointing out that it was conservative icon Ronald Reagan who cut taxes to 50%, he said, “It’s hard to believe that raising the top tax rate to 39.6 percent — where it was under President Clinton — will do grievous damage to the economy.” Of course, Reagan also cut the top tax rate to 28% in his second term, but that’s...

CINCINNATI — One of Cincinnati’s largest employers fired approximately 150 employees Wednesday for failing to get a required flu shot. TriHealth offered all of its 10,800 employees free flu shots. Employees had a month to get the flu shot. The deadline was Nov. 16. Employees who did not get the shot were terminated Wednesday, a company spokesperson said...

About a third of all tumors discovered in routine mammography screenings are unlikely to result in illness, according to a new study that says 30 years of the breast cancer exams have resulted in the overdiagnosis of 1.3 million American women. The report, published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine, argues that the increase in breast cancer survival rates over the last few decades is due mostly to improved therapies and not screenings, which are intended to flag tumors when they are small and most susceptible to treatment. Instead, the widespread use of mammograms now results in the...

"Her family was told she was brain dead..... Now she’s back at home cooking dinner with her family....The world of organ donation in Denmark is in turmoil. A documentary was aired earlier this month which showed family members reacting in anguish to the news that their 19-year-old daughter was brain dead after a car accident, agreeing to donate her organs and allowing doctors to turn off her respirator.....“But we made a mistake underway and made the family believe that their daughter and sister would die.”....The hospital acknowledged that the question of organ donation should not have been raised as there...

An ingredient in green tea that helps reduce blood sugar spikes in mice may lead to new diet strategies for people, according to Penn State food scientists. Mice fed an antioxidant found in green tea -- epigallocatechin-3-gallate, or EGCG -- and corn starch had a significant reduction in increase in their blood sugar -- blood glucose -- levels compared to mice that were not fed the compound, according to Joshua Lambert, assistant professor of food science in agricultural sciences. "The spike in blood glucose level is about 50 percent lower than the increase in the blood glucose level of mice...

Oklahoma is latest to reject state-based health exchangeBy Sam Baker - 11/19/12 03:23 PM ET Add Oklahoma to the list of Republican-led states that won't implement the key feature of President Obama's healthcare law. Gov. Mary Fallin said Monday that she won't set up a state-based insurance exchange — a new portal where people who don't get insurance through their employers can shop for coverage, often with help from a federal subsidy. "It does not benefit Oklahoma taxpayers to actively support and fund a new government program that will ultimately be under the control of the federal government, that is...

Everyone knows that a cup of tea is good for you, but the exact reasons for this are not clear. To discover the fundamentals of tea’s health benefits, scientists in Germany have investigated the interactions of compounds from tea with cells on a molecular level.Both green and black tea contain around 30,000 polyphenolic compounds, some of which have been shown to have numerous health benefits, including reducing cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis and inflammation. Despite their positive effects, which have been seen in epidemiological findings and clinical trials, their exact biochemical mechanism is still not clear. Polyphenols can act as antioxidants,...

As policymakers in Arizona decide whether or not to establish health insurance exchange, they should keep several key points in mind. The exchange will be Arizona-funded, not Arizona-run. The federal government will be in complete control of the exchange—from who can participate to what plans they can offer and prices they can charge. The federal legislation clearly states, “An Exchange may not establish rules that conflict with or prevent the application of regulations promulgated by the Secretary [of Health and Human Services].” The only part Arizona will play is picking up the tab. While we don’t know exactly how much...

The United States will require at least 52,000 more family doctors in the year 2025 to keep up with the growing and increasingly older U.S. population, a new study found. The predictions also reflect the passage of the Affordable Care Act — a change that will expand health insurance coverage to an additional 38 million Americans. "The health care consumer that values the relationship with a personal physician, particularly in areas already struggling with access to primary care physicians should be aware of potential access challenges that they may face in the future if the production of primary care physicians...

Despite uncertainty surrounding the fiscal cliff and whether or not President Obama can make "compromise" a theme of his second term, one thing is for certain: the Affordable Care Act, widely referred to as "Obamacare" is going to take effect. The lion's share of the law is to be implemented on January 1, 2014. The major tenets that will impact Americans include the individual mandate and the pre-existing conditions clause that will not allow insurers to refuse coverage to anyone, even if they are in poor health. ......................................................... And once the law actually goes into effect it's the pre-existing conditions...

RUSH: A bunch of CEOs are in Washington. These people are beside themselves. They're having to hire outside consultants to pore through the Obamacare legislation and advise them, tell them what they have to do to comply. And they are asking for some kind of relief. You've got John Schnatter at Papa John's pizza, the Applebee's people and a number of other restaurant chains are saying, "We have no choice." If they're gonna keep our products priced where they are, which is the price they've all determined is the most sensible for profit stability and affordability for customers, they're gonna...

A painful adjustment to last Tuesday's election. Last Tuesday evening I went to bed in denial, thinking that there must be some mistake. I declined to believe that a majority of the voters were stupid enough to re-elect a President whose incompetence makes Jimmy Carter seem Washingtonian by comparison, whose mendacity far surpasses that of a pathological liar like Bill Clinton, and whose administration is so corrupt that it actually evokes nostalgia for the Nixon era. I was sure that, when all the actual votes had been counted, they would reveal that the voters of Florida, Virginia, Ohio and Colorado...

PM2.5 air pollution is generated by combustion © ShutterstockThe US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finds itself in an unusual position. Two prominent Republican politicians, who have repeatedly accused the EPA of killing jobs through overregulation, are condemning the agency for lax oversight of its ongoing human research studies involving concentrated airborne particles.Representative Paul Broun, who chairs the investigations and oversight subcommittee of the House of Representatives’ Science Space and Technology Committee, has asked the EPA Inspector General (IG) to investigate a series of EPA studies. Conducted in 2004, they involved exposing humans to fine particulate matter around or smaller than...