A new piece in the New Yorker asks exactly that.
 Are you a Dr. Oz fan? Why wouldn’t you be? The charismatic heart surgeon/health guru, dubbed “America’s doctor” by Oprah herself, makes a monumental living telling us all how to eat better, have sex better, and indulge in raspberry ketones and green coffee beans.
In the current edition of the New Yorker, though, writer Michael Specter asks whether Oz’s success has led him over the line from physician to charlatan. It’s a fascinating profile, and the opening paragraphs—in which a TV film crew demands a take two of an emotionally laden moment between the doc and a patient—are harrowing.
Among the other highlights: Oz’s mentor, heart surgeon Eric Rose, says he wouldn’t send a patient to his protégé today: “In many respects, Mezmet is now an entertainer.” The portrait drawn of Oz’s wife/producer Lisa, a Bryn Mawr College grad who refuses to have their four children vaccinated for flu and convinced her husband to allow a Reiki practitioner into the surgical theater. And Oz opining on his favorite maladies: cancer “is our Angelina Jolie. We could sell that show every day.”
Read the piece here, and tell us what you think. How much do you trust Dr. Oz?
Photo: lev radin / Shutterstock.com
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And other survival tips for dealing with sick kids.
 So, how bad is the flu this flu season? It’s so bad that schools are closing all across the nation. It’s so bad that hospitals are firing workers who won’t get flu shots. It’s so bad, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports, that colleges are begging students returning to campus to wash their damn hands.
But you don’t care about any of that, because your gorgeous, beloved toddler is miserable thanks to the good old-fashioned cold. He’s crying, he has a fever, and he’s covered in so much drippy, gloppy green phlegm that you’re debating whether you should break out the ominous-looking nose-suction thingee you got at your baby shower but have never actually used.
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A new study of births after 9/11 highlights the surprising ways in which trauma affects male fetuses.
 For years, scientists have known that large-scale stressors like famines and floods correlate with a drop in the male-to-female birth rate among survivors. Studies of Chilean and Japanese earthquake victims and Swedish moms who were pregnant during natural disasters have shown decreases in the percentage of male offspring to which they gave birth. In the U.S., a nationwide study in 2010 showed male fetal deaths in the month after 9/11 shot up 12 percent—a figure researchers said was probably an underestimate, since many miscarriages go unreported. Even economic troubles and wars lower the percentage of male births among the pregnant population. (Conversely, in times of prosperity, more male babies are born.)
Now, a new study of births in California shows that boys born in December of 2001 are smarter than boys or girls whose moms weren’t pregnant during the Twin Towers attack. What in the world is going on?
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A new study implicates an obscure protein in bone fractures.
 Of course you want to keep running forever and not become that poor lady at the gym who’s all stooped over from osteoporosis. But the latest research says bone density alone doesn’t predict whose bones will become fragile. So how to keep yours strong?
A new study by researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has unraveled the process. When you trip or take a fall, two joined proteins in your bone, osteopotin and osteocalcin, are deformed by the impact, creating a tiny hole. Over time, these holes serve as a natural defense, absorbing impact to help prevent further damage. If the impact overwhelms, though, or if your bone lacks either or both of the proteins needed to form the holes, it cracks.
The study—our own Villanova U. was one of several institutions taking part—has focused scientists’ attention on reinforcing the bond between osteopontin and osteocalcin. Abnormalities in the latter’s production have been linked in the past to Type 2 diabetes and certain reproductive problems. Now scientists plan to study how supplementing osteocalcin might aid bone strength.
Note: To ward off fractures, the protein must be absorbed into the bone, a process that requires vitamin K. While scientists explore the complex interconnections between bone strength, osteocalcin and osteopontin, adding leafy greens like spinach and kale to your diet can only help.
Photo: Shutterstock
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And here you thought they wanted you living at home forevermore. A new study says it ain't so.
Your mama loves you, right? And you take her at face value when she says it’s no trouble at all that you’re still living with her and your dad, sleeping in your old bedroom, ordering your Netflix through their account and eating the last of the pistachio ice cream, because hey, you’re awesome, and who wouldn’t want you around, right?
You might want to check the results of a new study of adult children, their parents, and depression.
As reported at Science Daily, researchers from King’s College, London, examined the rates of depression among parents in Thailand whose children lived nearby and those whose kids had moved to urban centers. They found that parents whose kids flew farther had a 16 percent rate of depression, compared to 27 percent for those with at least one child living nearby. Among parents whose offspring moved away and then moved back home again, the depression rate was 33 percent. Similar results have been found from studies done in China.
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Shh! Don’t tell Bella, Jacob and Edward!
 “Is it a full moon?” my son asked a while back as he dragged himself in the door after another late shift at Wawa. “I think it had to be. People were crazy tonight.” Sure enough, the moon was full. I felt a little proud; I was the one who first informed him that he could expect wild behavior at work when the moon got big and round. Everybody knows insanity is tied to the lunar cycle, right? The pull of the tides, werewolves, increases in crime and suicide, and havoc at the touchscreens in Wawa … Why else do you think they call it “lunacy”?
Well, Jake, my dear, it turns out your mom told you another whopper, just like that little canard about Santa Claus. A team of French researchers recently concluded a major study reported at Science Daily of nearly 800 patients showing up at emergency rooms with chest pains that proved to have no medical basis. Doctors examining them determined that many of the patients were experiencing mental disorders—panic or anxiety attacks, mood disorders, thoughts of suicide. The researchers correlated the patients’ emergency-room arrivals with the phases of the moon. And they discovered … nothing. There was no statistical link between any of the moon’s four phases and the admittances—with one notable exception: Anxiety disorders decreased in the fourth quarter, a.k.a. the waning moon. According to study director Geneviève Belleville, “We observed no full-moon or new-moon effect on psychological problems.”
If you’ve spent your life believing there was such an effect, you’re in good company: 80 percent of nurses and 64 percent of doctors say the moon is tied to psychological behavior. Belleville hopes her study may refocus their attention from the skies to other factors affecting patients’ health.
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New studies at Penn say yes.
You know that bag of chips or bowl of popcorn that tastes so darned good at midnight? Scientists at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine say such nighttime snacks just might be why America’s obese. New studies conducted on mice indicate more strongly than ever that it’s not what you eat that makes the difference; it’s when.
The scientists were able to induce “energy storage”—the polite word for fat—in mice via a “relatively modest shift in food consumption into what is normally the rest period for mice,” according to research associate Georgios Paschos. “Our mice became obese without consuming more calories”— every dieter’s worst nightmare.
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A new study muddies the water even more.
 So for a while there earlier this year, we were all, “Ohmigod, I need more Vitamin D!” after a guest of the distinguished Dr. Oz recommended megadoses of 10,000 IU a day. Then the government told us ladies to stop taking low doses of D to prevent broken bones, since such doses don’t work. But what about high doses to prevent breaks? And cancer? And megadoses to ward off tuberculosis and HIV? What about breast cancer?
Head spinning yet? Too bad, because the newest study of all says you’ll live longer if you have low levels of vitamin D.
According to an article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Dutch researchers studied almost 400 families with nonagenarian members—those who live to be 90 or more—measuring their D levels as they varied with the seasons and controlling for, among other factors, tanning-bed use, vitamin supplementation, kidney function, age and sex. They found that the kids of nonagenarians who had at least one nonagenarian sibling had lower levels of vitamin D than the study’s control group, and that those kids were less likely to have a common genetic variation that tends to raise a person’s levels of the vitamin. The scientists think the long-lived low-vitaminers may harbor more of an “aging suppressor” protein. They add, of course, that further studies are needed.
Yeah. We’re sure more studies will clear things up.
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The NPR commentariat is in an uproar over a story on circumcision. You've got to read this.
You just never know what’s going to get people who get their news from NPR riled up. If you, like me, have just lived through another interminable droning fund-raising campaign (“Oh, I love to hear those pings!”) with such exciting “free” gifts as coffee mugs, grocery bags and puzzle books, you’ll be shocked—shocked!—to read the comments on the recent story titled, “German Lawmakers Move to Quell Uproar Over Circumcision.”
You may think that NPR listeners are out back tending to their compost heaps or in the study, quietly reading the complete works of Alexander Pope, but you’d be wrong. What they’re really doing is loudly and vocally arguing over how much male circumcision affects sexual pleasure. At length. In detail. For pages and pages and pages.
Really, you should check this out. You’ll never listen to You Bet Your Garden the same way again.
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The bacteria that cause acne, just like all bacteria everywhere, it seems, are becoming more and more resistant to antibiotics.
Anybody whose teen years (and, hell, early adult years, and maybe later adult years, too) were plagued by acne surely thinks, when glimpsing a present-day teen (or early or later adult) so plagued: “What, they can transplant entire faces and they haven’t cured acne yet?” In my brother’s teen years, back in the ’60s, the culprits were said to be dietary; our entire household ate uniodized salt and shunned tomatoes, French fries, chocolate and fish in hopes of clearing his complexion. (Love ya, Dave!) America also went through a period of hygiene-blaming: If you dumb kids would just wash your damned faces, that problem would clear up! Then came the antibiotics; then the big guns, like Accutane. And lasers! And light therapy! And still, there are zits.
Now comes word—cue ominous music—that the bacteria that cause acne, just like all bacteria everywhere, it seems, are becoming more and more resistant to antibiotics. Which is, like, a real problem, because acne treatments like the kind Katy Perry hawks aren’t, like, all that. What does work against acne can prove problematic—Accutane can cause depression and birth defects; lasers and light therapy are pricey and often aren’t covered by insurance.
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