The People's Pharmacy

Do you add thyme to your chicken soup? Basil and oregano to your pasta sauce? These herbs are staples in most kitchens, and they help good cooks make their meals extra-tasty. We love using herbs and spices ourselves when we cook. Consequently, we were dismayed to read that some cooking spices are contaminated with heavy […]

For such a small organ, your thyroid gland has an outsize impact. It controls energy utilization throughout every tissue in your body. When the thyroid gland isn’t working well, you may notice changes in your digestion, your heart rate, your skin, hair, muscles and your weight. A faltering thyroid may even have an impact on […]

Research over the past few decades has revealed that we humans host a bewildering variety of invisible creatures, our microbiota. We can almost envision the collective genome of all these microbes, the microbiome, as a sort of second genome for human individuals. Unlike our human genome, the microbiome can be altered based on our diet […]

Have you ever put mushrooms in a salad? Might you add them to an appetizer? Stir-fries and frittatas with mushrooms are no longer surprising. Which mushrooms would you select for those dishes? You can find out in a gorgeous cookbook called The Fantastic Fungi Community Cookbook. Editor Eugenia Bone describes her fascination with fungi and […]

The COVID-19 pandemic has been dragging on for longer than most people imagined possible. With each new variant, cases surge and people need to make complex risk calculations about school, work and social interactions. Needless to say, all this can create a great deal of anxiety. Health care workers are under enormous strain. So are […]

We have heard that some people used their time locked down at home during the pandemic to clean out their closets and clear away the clutter. For others, though, we suspect that such projects would have been overwhelming or possibly even undesirable. Perhaps you know someone with hoarding symptoms such as excessive acquiring activities, difficulty […]

More Americans are living to old ages, but frequently their later years are plagued with chronic diseases. Is there a way to stay healthy into the ninth and tenth decade of life? To find out, we take a virtual trip to visit centenarians in a remote village in southern China. Visit to Longevity Village: Dr. […]

Can you have too much togetherness? After a year of pandemic restrictions that kept many couples cooped up together for months, some have discovered that minor annoyances loom larger. Couples have had to negotiate their roles and responsibilities more intensely than ever. This has put quite a strain on some relationships. Pre-existing problems have been […]

Almost thirty years ago, Laurie Garrett published The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. In this thorough, carefully researched analysis, she laid out why public health authorities should be watching for new pathogens and how they should respond if that happened. Since then, of course, a number of bacteria and […]

In September, more than 200 top medical journals around the world took the unprecedented step of publishing the same editorial. It was “Call for Emergency Action to Limit Global Temperature Increases, Restore Biodiversity, and Protect Health.”  In it, editors of various journals identify climate change as the greatest threat to global health. As a consequence, […]