Bias Alert: I hate cars.
Okay, not in actual practice. In fact, I love the experience of driving down the freeway, humming a tune, chin-bobbing along to the music with my daughters. Some of life’s most profound, intimate conversations only take place when you’re strapped next to someone, facing front.
So then why do I hate cars? [...]

Oooh, there are just some kinds of evil that we’d all love to get our hands on - you know what I mean, the old “give-me-10-minutes-alone-in-the-interrogation-room-with-the-cameras-turned-off” urge. When it comes to serial killers, some have a lot to answer for. One of the worst of the worst just took a blow to the nuts, and [...]

Ready to scratch your head in bafflement? Here is a beautiful, well-designed, thorough study with every criteria you could possibly want in order to get a clear answer. What’s more, this study looked at a pressing, serious, common issue that is near to all our hearts (so to speak) - does exercise and eating well [...]

Diabetes treatment is becoming more, not less, controversial. Here is another in a series of recent articles trying to answer the question - how low should you go in trying to get glucose levels as close to normal as possible? In other words, the diabetes limbo game. In our first study, the glucose measurement used [...]

Run (don’t walk) your fingers over to click on this link to a great article by Jane Gross of the New York Times. In it, she spells out four major steps she wishes she’d done differently when her mother was failing at home. Today more and more Americans are the sandwich generation, and, like Ms. [...]

Seems like a weird idea, right? However, research shows that children conceived by donor sperm (or eggs) benefit greatly from hearing about how they were conceived early in life - specifically before the age of 4. While this may be a bit hard from some of us to get our heads around, the facts of [...]

As regular readers know, we here at Doc Gurley like practical info - too often the news is full of fear-mongering reports, or information that you can’t use. So it’s the practical slant that we really like in this report on parental rage at children’s sports events. This study in Applied Social Psychology highlights the [...]

Here’s a potent argument in support of those Oh-So-Annoying JCAHO regulations - outpatients getting clinic-based chemotherapy came down with a rare, nasty blood infection. Clinics aren’t covered by those irritating rules and regulations. Perhaps the only way anyone really recognized the source of these infections is because the germ was sooo unusual.  Alcaligenes is a [...]

Sometimes playing the blame game is the right thing to do. Recent research is pointing an accusing finger at doctors who fail to obtain appropriate health tests and interventions for…well, let’s just say certain patients. As in, specifically, African American patients. Is this racism? Class-ism? Sexism? Do your doctor’s biases affect your health? Or [...]

Ah, that amazing sunshine vitamin strikes again. Studies are now mounting (this is not the first) to show a strong link between vitamin D and your heart. Low vitamin D levels are linked to increased risks of heart attack. This latest study is a case control study in the Archives of Internal Medicine that shows [...]

You remember that fable, don’t you? The one where six blindfolded men each describe an elephant - or at least the part he could reach. One said the elephant was a fan (the ear), another said it was a giant snake (the trunk), another said it was a tree trunk (the leg), and so on [...]

Here’s a provocative study - but one that we should maybe take with a grain of salt. It fits the Doc Gurley criteria for interesting studies in that it: 1) deals with a common problem, 2) offers a low-cost, low-risk way of improving that problem, 3) uses an approach that already has known health benefits, [...]

Summer heat and longer daylight hours often mean the loss of an hour or two of sleep a day. Add onto that the end-of-school frantic rush, and the loss of school-related bedtime/awakening routines, and you can easily find yourself staggering through your days in a sleep-deprived fog. It’s a good time of year to remind [...]

It’s that time of year again - when we can take simple steps to prevent West Nile disease. So why don’t more of us do it? Could it be that many of us are Living in the Land of West Denial? The unfortunate truth is that the West Nile virus has quickly spread across most [...]

Here’s a great article for all of us - it’s a science-based review of effective techniques for optimizing your exercise/weight loss approach. In other words, fitness advice for we Every Day Athletes. This clear, breezy Prevention article was billed as an article that addresses the “plateau” that people hit just as their initial enthusiasm for [...]

Here’s my kind of weight loss - and a nice, pragmatic follow-up to the Annual Bikini Bamboozle. Prevention magazine noticed that a lot of medical literature about weight deals with the way our daily lives prevent us from moving around. It’s not hard to spend entire days doing nothing more than a series of “sits” [...]

Raise your hand if your mother ever asked teenaged-you “Just because everyone else is doing it, doesn’t mean you have to - what if everyone was running off a cliff - would you?”
Is there anyone who didn’t raise their hand? Well, much as it sticks in the craw (or is that beak?) the fact is, [...]

Ever stand in front of the bulletin board at the local coffee shop and see two side by side notes tacked up with pushpins? Dog Lost. Dog Found. Makes you want to call both and let them know things would work out much better if they just got together and compared info. Similar things happen [...]

More exciting news on the cancer front. How would you like it if someone told you there is a drug available to you free - and this drug is not just any drug. This drug is associated with a massive decrease in breast cancer, prostate cancer, autoimmune diseases (including juvenile diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, and [...]

Great news! Researchers have discovered that regular exercise for teens can reduce the risk of breast cancer later in life - especially the more-aggressive, usually-harder-to-treat, pre-menopausal kind of breast cancer. How much exercise are we talking about? Not an extreme athlete kind. The study found the lowest risk among girls who did 3 and 1/4 [...]