The People's Pharmacy

If you were to list the organs of the body, would it occur to you to include fat? Most people think of fat as a nuisance, an intruder or even an enemy to be overcome. But fat is crucial for normal physiological processes. What should you know about the secret life of fat? Discovering the […]

In this show, we explore the stories behind some health headlines: the drawbacks of OTC sleeping pills and the best way to use them; whether arthritis drugs cause heart attacks; and how to afford a drug with a narrow therapeutic index. When researchers discovered that the pain reliever Vioxx was associated with an increased risk of […]

Have you ever started taking a medication and discovered that it produced an unpleasant side effect? That’s not uncommon. Sometimes the doctor responds by prescribing an additional drug to manage a side effect from the first one. Occasionally a person will get caught in a cascade that results in several drugs to treat side effects caused […]

The idea of yoga classes usually brings to mind images of young, fit people twisting their bodies into difficult poses while breathing deeply. But does yoga benefit people who don’t fit that stereotype? Yoga for People with Pain or Disability: Both our guests teach yoga to people who are neither young nor fit. These are […]

Medications are often crucial for maintaining our health, but every drug you take has potential side effects and may interact with other medicines. What do you know about these hazards? Understanding Benefits and Risks: Our guest, Dr. Russ Altman, suggests that physicians should exercise more restraint in prescribing and patients should ask more questions about […]

Habits-things you do on a regular basis without even thinking about them-can have a huge impact on our health. But it isn’t easy to drop old habits that aren’t serving us well, like eating a pint of ice cream every night. Nor is it always easy to adopt healthier habits that could be more helpful, like […]

Dr. Andrew Weil, the country’s leading expert in integrative medicine, believes that good health begins in the kitchen. It’s hardly revolutionary to propose that diet matters when it comes to our health, but so many people feel that eating delicious, healthy home-cooked meals isn’t possible for them. They don’t have time, they say, or they […]

Occasionally a medication that has been on the market for some time is found to do unexpected harm. That happened with Vioxx, and led researchers to take a closer look at all NSAIDS. A large trial showed that the NSAID pain reliever celecoxib (Celebrex) is no worse than naproxen in raising the risk of heart attacks. […]

When two people join to form a family, they bring with them lots of habits and expectations based on the families they grew up in. Sometimes these constitute big differences, but more often they are little things. Who does the dishes? Do you agree on how that should be done? How can you keep those […]

In the recent election, voters in several more states approved the use of medical marijuana. Now more than half the states in the US accept the medicinal use of cannabis, but the federal government does not. As a recent New York Times article about a cannabis company in California illustrates, that creates a certain amount […]