The health headlines move fast and most coverage gets the science wrong. Every day, Dr. Ravi Kumar, MD, a board-certified neurosurgeon, cuts through the noise: what a new study or story actually says, what it doesn’t, and what it means for you. Researched, sourced, and reviewed before it’s published.
A study of 4.2 million emergency visits found that the clinicians with the best looking scan statistics had nearly double the rate of lung clots that went home undiagnosed, which is worth knowing before you leave an ER with unexplained shortness of breath.
Nearly three quarters of the 57 people infected had no documented measles vaccination and 89% were hospitalized, which is the part of this $8.7 million bill worth checking your own family record against.
A study of 92 million US adults found that more than a million patients were prescribed Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro or a similar drug with no approved reason in their chart, and a third of those patients were already at a normal weight when they got the prescription.
The model read scans radiologists were never trained to use this way and caught nine in ten cancers, but in real-world testing more than half the people it flagged did not have cancer, and the software is not running in American hospitals.
A review of 227 randomised trials found exercise by itself improved memory, thinking and mental speed in adults over 60, which tells a worried 65-year-old where to put their effort first.
A study of 853,131 US veterans found that common blood test scores sort out who is heading toward liver scarring, but are close to useless for deciding who needs liver cancer screening.
A Cochrane review of 87 trials and about 36,000 women found low-dose mifepristone beat levonorgestrel, the over-the-counter pill sold as Plan B, with fewer side effects, but the drug is not approved for emergency contraception in the United States.
A Cochrane review of 110 studies and 48,919 older adults found that fall prevention programs built around an individual risk assessment did not beat plain falls education, while exercise on its own held its ground against every complex program tested.
The phase 2 EVITA trial failed the endpoint it was built around, yet people taking 1,000 mg of vitamin C a day were far less likely to die, and more than half of them were deficient before they swallowed a single pill.
A 332,438-person Danish trial found the high-dose flu vaccine's advantage over the standard shot grew as frailty grew, which gives a healthy 65-year-old little reason to go hunting for it.
A nationwide study in CHEST finds 13.5% of US adults with a smoking history qualify for a lung cancer scan only under the American Cancer Society's newer rule, and most of them never get one, partly because the federal criteria that drive insurance coverage still leave them out.
In 193,260 Americans tested for tick-borne illness, 29.5% of those with lab evidence of Lyme also carried antibodies to a second tick pathogen, and the standard Lyme antibiotic does nothing against one of the most common ones.