The FDA has finally taken action against labeling and claims made by sunscreen manufacturers. Guidelines from 1978 have changed after review of the abundance research.  Manufacturers are now held accountable to provide and implement new testing to assure the reliability of their SPF claims.   To comply they will be subject to lab and humans skin testing using standardized sun simulators. They will also have to scientifically...

Kudos to Angelina Jolie for bringing this topic into the forefront, as well as showing us that our breasts alone don’t define what makes us sexy, feminine and beautiful! But if you don’t have a family member who has had breast or ovarian cancer, chances are that you probably don’t have this mutation. Some studies estimate the frequency of the BRCA1 mutation in the general population is about 1 in 1500 women. In fact this gene mutation...

On the Today Show this morning a women admits after a 9-mile training run for a half marathon, she is taken to the hospital with horrible stomach pains only to give birth to a baby girl. Can someone be pregnant at full term and not know it? Strange but actually true, it is called unknown concealed pregnancy.   Statistics show the chances of not knowing you are pregnant at 20 weeks gestation is about 1 in 457 pregnancies. However, the...

Anecdotally  in the past, it has been noted that  people who live in the Mediterranean region seemed to have less heart disease. Aside from the beauty and sunshine, which melts the stress of all vacationers there, it was presumed their diet might have something to do with it. Now the first relatively large study was recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine. They looked at over 7400 patients who were overweight, smokers...

Just discussed this with Jenna Lee on Fox New’s Happening Now. The CDC released new rates for autism. Reports now show, that 1 in 88 kids can be identified as having some disorder on the autism spectrum. That is up from 1 in 110 with the biggest jump in Hispanic and African American children. And they reported also seeing increase in diagnosis at younger ages such at the age of 3, which is good because many studies find earlier...

Every holiday season it seems I get asked to comment on the same questions, which have become urban legends. So here are the top 5 holiday health myths revealed: Are poinsettia plants are toxic? The answer is a resounding no! Every year kids or pets are rushed in to their respective ERs or countless calls come into Poison Control Centers around the country for ingestion of some part of the popular holiday plant. However, according to the...

This thanksgiving as you  prepare for your holiday heading over the river and through the wood to grandmother’s house, make sure your trip does not include a stop at the ER. Unfortunately with all the rushing and preparations many will wind up there anyway! Here are top 5 potential problems we see every year around the holidays, as well tips to help make your Thanksgiving (and mine as an ER doc) uneventful. 1) Burns A common injury...