Author: Medshadow Staff

Why Doctors Prescribe Statins Doctors prescribe statins to lower cholesterol and reduce the risk of heart disease.  What are Statins? Most of the cholesterol in your blood doesn’t come from butter, cheese, and egg yolks, but instead from your body’s own liver. Statins are drugs that prevent your liver from making the cholesterol that can clog your arteries. Statins work by blocking the activity of an enzyme known as HMG-CoA reductase, which is involved in the body’s production of cholesterol.  Do Statins Work? Statins do seem to lower cholesterol for most people who take them. However, how much the cholesterol…

Read More

NEW YORK, NY, May 19, 2023: PharmedOut will host its ninth annual conference, “Making Healthy People Sick: Invented Diseases and Overdiagnosis” on June 15 and 16 at the Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, DC. The event will feature MedShadow’s own founder and president Suzanne Robotti as a speaker. PharmedOut is a Georgetown University Medical Center project that aims to “advance evidence-based prescribing and educate health care professionals and students about pharmaceutical and medical device marketing practices.” The organization accomplishes its goals through educational slideshows, videos, events, and information about Continuing Medical Education (CME) courses. The department does so free…

Read More

Do you have a personal story about side effects or alternatives? Are you an expert on an alternative to drugs? Would you like to place a guest post or contribute an article to MedShadow? Do you love one of our stories so much that you’d like to share it or republish it on your site? Great! We love to share. But we have a few guidelines. Your story on MedShadow We would love to receive your personal “First Person” story. Send us a brief outline of your story. These stories should be in the first person, using “I” and “me.”…

Read More

A friend of mine has breast cancer. When she shared the news with our friends she told us she was facing breast cancer surgery. Our friends responded with an extraordinary outpouring of very personal advice and support based on their own experience. In a modern twist, this group of friends have never met in person and we don’t know anyone’s last names. We’re all members of a special interest Yahoo Listserv – a kind of private group eMail based on a common interest. Even though the common interest was not breast cancer, there were many members who undergone similar breast…

Read More

MADERA, Calif. — Growing up amid the dusty agricultural fields of the Central Valley, Ruby Marentes-Cabrera can’t recall a time when it wasn’t difficult to breathe. Diagnosed with asthma early in childhood, the ninth grader has come to detest the pistachio trees that surround her home because the dust, pesticides and other allergens that blow off the orchards often trigger an asthma attack — even infiltrating her home so that simple chores like vacuuming can be dangerous. “We live so close to the fields — I breathe the dust and chemicals in,” said Ruby, 14, describing coughing and wheezing fits…

Read More

With the flurry of shopping, spending money and traveling to see family, managing stress can feel inevitable during the holidays. You might already know stress can affect your own health, but what you may not realize is that your stress – and how you manage it – is catching. Your stress can spread around, particularly to your loved ones. As a social-health psychologist, I have developed a model on how partners and their stress influence each other’s psychological and biological health. Through that and my other research, I’ve learned that the quality of intimate relationships is crucial to people’s health.…

Read More

Kids ages 5 to 11 can now be vaccinated against COVID-19 following the Food and Drug Administration’s emergency use authorization of the Pfizer Bio-NTech vaccine for this age group and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s endorsement in early November 2021. Some parents remain hesitant about vaccinating their kids. But many around the country are enthusiastically signing up and lining up to get their elementary schoolers vaccinated. Yet parents of children under 5 are still left wondering when their children will be vaccinated. Experts suggest it may not be before next year. This wait could prompt parents and doctors…

Read More

Excerpt: Parents in the U.S. have found themselves impacted by toxic stress with work, child care, and isolation. Read this parent’s patient story. December 1, 2021 by Paul Tullis Erin Bascom’s job in HIV prevention training shifted to work-from-home in mid-March 2020, around the same time that she and her husband decided to keep their daughter, then 2, home from daycare out of concern over Covid-19. Initially, the plan was for the parents to take turns, one caring for the toddler while the other worked. But then Bascom’s husband, who serves in Maryland’s National Guard, was called to active duty…

Read More

In the fall of 2016, sex therapist and researcher Leonore Tiefer shuttered the New View Campaign, an organization she had founded to combat what she refers to as “the medicalization of sex” — essentially, the pharmaceutical industry’s efforts to define variations in sexuality and sexual problems as medical issues requiring a  libido drug fix.ee For 16 years, the group had fought against industry’s involvement in sex research, including its push for a drug to boost women’s sex drives. New View hosted conferences and its members penned papers and testified before the United States Food and Drug Administration. The campaign was…

Read More

Here at MedShadow, we pride ourselves on giving you the information you need to make informed decisions about your health to balance the risks and benefits of illnesses, medicines, alternative treatments, and lifestyle. The convergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Thanksgiving holiday gives us the rare opportunity to provide insight into how each of us has evaluated the risks and benefits — to ourselves and to our loved ones — of gathering with family and friends in these unusual times. Below, each staff member walks you through how they reached their decision on holiday plans this year. Denavi Every…

Read More