Sixty percent of adult Americans now take some type of nutritional supplement accounting for $36 billion in sales in 2014. To discuss all of them would require a tome thicker than Webster’s Dictionary, so I’ll restrict this post to multivitamins. Almost 80% of physicians recommend them to patients, while more than 70% take one themselves. Half of all American adults take a multivitamin at least some of the time. Should you? Continue reading
Month: September 2015
I’m skeptical about … strep throat.
Strep is a bacterium meaning that it has a cell membrane, cytoplasm, DNA, and can replicate independently thereby rendering it susceptible to a host of antibiotics including penicillin. Viruses, on the other hand, lacking these same attributes do not respond to routine antibiotics. There are many varieties of strep including S. pneumoniae, the most common cause of pneumonia, but for the remainder of this post when I use the word strep, I am referring to group A beta-hemolytic strep, the bug that causes strep throat. Continue reading