Marijuana may now be legal in Colorado, said Jordan Weissmann, but do purchasers really know what they’re buying? New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd highlighted that problem last week by describing what happened when she went to Denver to sample edible marijuana. Dowd ate too much of a weed-laced candy bar, which had no dosing instructions, and spent eight hours […]
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Hormones found in birth control pills could be polluting the water supply and increasing men’s risk of prostate cancer. That’s the suspicion of Canadian researchers who found that countries that have the highest percentage of women using oral contraceptives also have the highest rates of men with prostate cancer. Women who take birth control pills excrete estrogen from the medication […]
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Training for a marathon and other extreme workouts may be more harmful than healthy. After reviewing over 50 studies, researchers at the Mayo Clinic found that more than an hour of intense aerobic activity per day put runners and cyclists at heightened risk of serious heart problems, including an irregular heartbeat, clogged arteries, and scarring. Habitual marathon runners and professional […]
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Linfen, China A suspected Chinese organ trafficker gouged out the eyes of a 6-year-old boy to steal the corneas for the black market. The boy was playing outside his house in Shanxi province last weekend when a woman kidnapped and drugged him. His parents found him hours later with bloody eye sockets, and the eyeballs were found nearby missing the […]
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Leonid Ivanovich Rogozov was a Soviet general practitioner who took part in the sixth Soviet Antarctic Expedition in 1960–1961. He was the only doctor stationed at the Novolazarevskaya Station and, while there, developed appendicitis, which meant he had to perform an appendectomy on himself, a famous case of self-surgery. Leonid Rogozov was born in Dauriya Station, Chita Oblast, a remote […]
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■ A Canadian man was scratching his back when he noticed a pointy protrusion. It turned out to be a 3-inch knife blade that was buried in his flesh three years earlier. Billy McNeely, 32, said he’d often complained to doctors about chronic back pain after he was stabbed in a 2010 brawl, but physicians told him it was just […]
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