ArcaMax

New recommendations from the American College of Physicians suggest patients are taking antibiotics for too long.

Often, antibiotic are prescribed for daily use over a week or longer. The new recommendations suggest five days is best practice for a variety of common infections, such as uncomplicated bronchitis, community-acquired pneumonia, ...Read more

Being a frontline health care worker during the COVID-19 pandemic can be a continuing source of sleeplessness, which may increase the risk of contracting the disease. In a summer 2020 survey of 2,884 workers exposed to COVID-19 patients daily, 568 developed COVID-19. For each hour longer that these health care workers slept, their odds of ...Read more

One of the alleged side effects of statins -- a popular class of drugs used to prevent deaths from heart attacks and strokes -- is the perception that they cause muscle pain. A new trial asked older patients who had stopped taking statins (or were thinking about it) because of associated pain to go back on the drug or take a placebo. They ...Read more

For a small but troubling number of people who get COVID-19, the symptoms do not pass after just a couple of weeks. They persist, often for months, perhaps longer. A new study suggests one way to predict who might be a long-hauler is the number of symptoms that manifest in the early days, such as fatigue, headache, shortness of breath, fever, ...Read more

As schools reopen to in-classroom instruction, there may be a cautionary tale from Hong Kong. When children there returned to school in October, large numbers of kids began getting sick, despite mandatory masking, more spacing between desks and other measures intended to reduce the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

But the vast majority of sick...Read more

The Eagles may have been singing about something else, but new research suggests that eyes are not necessarily true windows to the soul -- or, more precisely, how another person is feeling.

It's a common notion that "smiling eyes" that involve uplifted cheeks and crinkles around the eyes indicate genuine happiness. They even have a technical ...Read more

Pandemic-related lockdowns have become associated with a host of personal and social ills, from loneliness and isolation to poor schooling to increased rates of drug use. But a study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry surveyed 385 caregivers of children ages 6-16 and found that some people have discovered an upside to being stuck ...Read more

Some folks are seemingly obsessed with bargain hunting or extreme couponing. Assumed to be a habit copied from parents, a new study published in The Journal of the Association for Consumer Research suggests there might actually be a genetic component.

Researchers studied more than 100 pairs of twins (identical and fraternal), comparing their ...Read more

The Food and Drug Administration is advising consumers to avoid hand sanitizers from Mexico, which may contain a toxic form of alcohol. Some of these products use methanol or wood alcohol, which can be toxic when absorbed through the skin.

Methanol-contaminated hand sanitizers have been implicated in blindness, cardiac and central nervous ...Read more

New research suggests low-frequency electrical stimulation of the brain may help people reduce obsessive behaviors, such as hoarding. It's estimated the neurological disorder affects nearly 1 billion people worldwide.

Scientists believe obsessive behaviors are the result of abnormal habit-learning. Something goes wrong in the brain where ...Read more