Author: Lance Garrison

Nov. 16, 2023 – A new toothpaste is showing promise as a treatment to help adults who are allergic to peanuts tolerate increasing amounts of peanut protein.The investigational toothpaste is labeled INT301 and it met its safety goals in an early randomized, placebo-controlled trial.Thirty-two adults, ages 18-55, who were allergic to peanuts, were enrolled in the 4-month trial. The participants were randomly placed into groups that received either increasing amounts of the peanut protein in the toothpaste to test how much they could tolerate safely or a placebo toothpaste that had no peanut proteins. The toothpaste was squeezed from a…

Seniors are one of the fastest-growing populations of cannabis users in the United States. While some older adults have used pot for decades, studies suggest that others are turning to the drug for the first time to help them sleep better, dampen pain or treat anxiety — especially when prescription drugs, which often come with unwanted side effects, don’t work as intended.In 2007, only about 0.4 percent of people age 65 and older in the United States had reported using cannabis in the past year, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. That number rose to almost…

Remember when “liberal” was a dirty word? In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan, who often prefaced it with a damning “tax and spend,” may have been the most effective of bashers. But the most blatant attack was in the early ’90s, after Newt Gingrich’s political organization GOPAC sent out a memo, “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” urging fellow Republicans to use the word as a slur.It worked. Even Democrats began avoiding the dread label. In a presidential primary debate in 2007, Hillary Clinton called herself instead a “modern progressive.” She avoided the term “liberal” again in 2016.Now the word is…

The lights are going to stay on in federal government offices, and also in the suite of the House speaker, Mike Johnson’s, at least for a few more weeks. Up to now, it hadn’t been clear that both could happen at the same time.Mr. Johnson, who has been in his new job only since Oct. 25, had to scramble to prevent the government from shutting down this Friday, and he managed to pull it off. He came up with an oddly structured stopgap bill to keep the government open until early next year, which the House passed on Tuesday and…

You may be among the 45% of adults who snore at least occasionally or you likely know someone who does. They may be the brunt of jokes (“Uncle Joe snores so loudly he rattles the windows!”), but snoring is serious business.For one, a snoring person often keeps their partner from a good night’s sleep, which can be stressful. “Snoring can create real problems in a marriage,” says Daniel P. Slaughter, MD, an otolaryngologist and snoring expert at Capital Otolaryngology in Austin, Texas.Not only is snoring a nuisance, but 75% of people who snore have obstructive sleep apnea (when breathing is disrupted…

With the bilateral slaughter in the Middle East unleashing poisons that are worsening hatred worldwide, let me outline what I see as three myths inflaming the debate:The first myth is that in the conflict in the Middle East there is right on one side and wrong on the other (even if people disagree about which is which).Life isn’t that neat. The tragedy of the Middle East is that this is a clash of right versus right. That does not excuse Hamas’s massacre and savagery or Israel’s leveling of entire neighborhoods in Gaza, but underlying the conflict are certain legitimate aspirations…

It’s the middle of the day and you just can’t seem to get out of first gear. And it’s not the first timeWhat’s making you feel so wiped out? There is a long list of possible reasons, and many of them are things that you can influence. Check out these common culprits for fatigue and get some pep back in your step.Everyday habits can make a big difference.”With my patients, I talk about the three pillars of health: sleep, diet, and exercise,” says Theodore Friedman, MD, PhD, chair of medicine at the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science…

In Britain, Armistice Day is usually an understated affair, marked only by two minutes of silence at 11 a.m. This year was considerably more eventful, as two very different protests descended on London.One, composed of hundreds of thousands of people calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, snaked peacefully through the west of the city and over the River Thames — a patchwork of red, green, white and black. The other, comprising a few hundred people from Britain’s far right and football hooligan networks, gathered several miles away in Westminster. Ostensibly there to defend a key national war memorial from the…

You need to have erections regularly to keep your penis in shape. “It has to be essentially exercised,” says Tobias Kohler, MD, assistant professor of urology at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine. To maintain a healthy tone, the smooth muscle of the penis must be periodically enriched with oxygen by the rush of blood that engorges the penis and makes it erect, Kohler says. If guys are physically able to get erect, but never have erections during the day — maybe they find themselves in very un-erotic circumstances for a long time — they needn’t worry. The brain has an automatic penis…

Sometimes I miss the good old days when Donald Trump could be shocking.It’s really hard to imagine something he could say now that would throw us for a loop. You probably heard that on Veterans Day he celebrated the men and women who’ve fought for American democracy by promising to “root out” his liberal opponents. Otherwise known as “the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”Now, would you say he was making a threat — or just trying to show off his vocabulary? Don’t know if any other president…