My Blog
Operating Room Lights and Snow Globes
If you’ve ever tried to hold a flashlight for someone while they work under the hood of a car, you understand the importance of good lighting. The inside of a human body is a dark place, and surgeons need a lot of light to see what they are doing. Ever wonder how...
What Was Wrong With Tiny Tim?
A Christmas Carol, a novella of 30,000 words, was written by Charles Dickens in six weeks in 1843. It has never gone out of print. The book's sustained success has contributed to how Christmas is celebrated and introduced the phrases “Merry Christmas” and “Bah!...
Christmas in a Children’s Hospital
In December, the questions parents ask in the hospital are different. Instead of “Will my child be OK?”, we pediatric hospitalists hear: “We have plane tickets to go skiing for Christmas. Will he be well by then?” “She’ll be home for Christmas, right? We’ve never been...
Redheads Really Are Different
In the spirit of Christmas, I’ll ask- was Santa Claus a redhead? Lore and traditions link him to red-haired figures like Sinterklaas and St. Nicholas. Modern interpretations like the classic holiday movie, Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town (1970), suggest Santa...
Black Friday May Be Bad For Your Health
Happy Black Friday! We seem to have divided ourselves into two groups: those who are stretched out on the couch eating leftover turkey sandwiches, and those who are up at the crack of dawn hitting the malls for the best shopping deals of the year. Either way, there...
Why Does My Pee Smell Funny After I Eat Asparagus?
We’ve always heard that dogs have a much better sense of smell than us humans do. After all, there are convict-sniffing bloodhounds, bomb-sniffing dogs, drug-sniffing dogs, even cancer-sniffing dogs. Scientists have trained canines to sniff out lung, breast, ovarian,...
Bats Don’t Really Suck Your Blood…..
You’re getting one last Halloween post, because, of course, we haven’t talked about bats! Bats are the second largest order of mammals after rodents, and the only mammal capable of true flight. There are 1,500 species of bats, and they range in size from a 5-inch...
Vampires Were Just Sick People (Maybe?)
Happy Halloween. It’s one of my favorite holidays (skeletons, blood, walking dead- what’s not to like?). I’ve been thinking a lot about vampires, and how the vampire myth originated. As a refresher, vampires are creatures that prey on humans and drink their blood....
Grateful for Spider Venom??
Did you enjoy learning about the Gila monster last week? I’m still in a Halloween mood. Let’s talk about spiders. First, I must confess I love spiders. They are such wonderful engineers. Did you know that, as they are spinning their web threads, they can modify the...
The Monstrous Story of GLP-1
Halloween is coming! Let’s talk about monsters. Everyone’s heard about the amazing new GLP-1 weight loss drugs Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and others. But did you know there’s a monster involved? Before we go further, a little refresher is needed. These drugs were...