How’s this for twisted: An insurance company, Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield, have demanded that the parents of minor children who suffer from anorexia turn over their children’s writings on MySpace and Facebook, as well as any emails where they discuss their problems.
Gout sounds like something characters in Dickens novels get, but apparently it’s a modern affliction as well—at least in the U.S. where the number of cases has doubled in the past few decades. Now researchers are saying that “Men who consume two or more sugary soft drinks a day have an 85% higher risk of gout compared with those who drink less than one a month.”
The study was conducted by Prof. Paul L. Dawson, a food microbiologist, who decided to experiment with “double dipping” after watching a Seinfeld re-run in which a character named “Timmy” objects to George’s dubious dipping habits.
Several of the doctors who were involved in clinical research trials of a new back injury treatment, Prodisc, were also early investors in the product and had a financial incentive to see it succeed, reports the New York Times. This may have led to its success as a treatment being overstated.
Last week, Pennsylvania’s Attorney General filed a consumer protection lawsuit against the PA-based company Pure Weight Loss and its owner, Vahan Karian. Pure Weight Loss, which has about 400 stores nationwide, announced last December that it was going out of business, and yet continued to accept pre-payment from unaware customers up to four days after posting the announcement on its website. Since closing, it has failed to reimburse customers fees for unfulfilled contracts or deliver the supplies they’ve already bought.
Do you like kidney stones? Great! Coke and Pepsi are the drinks for you. Researchers at the National Institutes of Health found that drinking just two cans of cola per day doubles the risk of chronic kidney disease.
Today I successfully objected to an arbitration clause and was still able to get the service. It was for acupuncture. I was filling out all the blah blah forms and then I came across the arbitration agreement. I wasn’t even planning on this, I just saw it and got really uncomfortable.
A proposed class action lawsuit was filed yesterday in California against Dannon over the company’s unsubstantiated claims that its Activia, Activia Lite and DanActive “probiotic” yogurts were healthier than regular yogurt.
The U.S. Institute of Medicine called on Congress today to “establish a single national resource of health information.” The resource would collect all available data on every drug in the marketplace, and be available to consumers to educate themselves about any and all possible treatments in order to make better-informed decisions with their doctors.
Sushi from 5 of the 20 places had mercury levels so high that the Food and Drug Administration could take legal action to remove the fish from the market. The sushi was bought by The New York Times in October.
As plastic surgery has become increasingly common in America — some 16 million procedures were performed in 2007 — so has the consumer backlash.
The New York City Board of Health will vote today on a new regulation requiring calories on menu boards in New York City. The former rule was shot down by a federal judge who ruled that the regulation’s criteria for determining which restaurants would be required to post calorie information on their menus was illegal.
A woman in Slovenia who found a preserved mouse foot in her jar of pickles complained to the Health Ministry. A ministry official wrote back with a summary of how mice parts end up in factory-made food products, and then concluded, “A mice-foot therefore could be classified as a special additive to the pickles.”
Hey St. John’s Dairy Queen workers, you forgot to make your Facebook group private. Now your hilarious little videos of each other mooning the drive-thru and waging indoor snowball fights are all over Canadian television. They just don’t understand your jokes about “using meat the next day that wasn’t kept overnight in the cooler.” Neither do the health inspectors.
In February 2007, the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles abandoned Gabino Olvera, a mentally ill paraplegic man, on the street: “[The hospital] took him across town in a van and left him in a soiled hospital gown without a wheelchair in the heart of the city’s homeless area.” Olvera, with the help of an advocacy organization called Public Counsel, is now suing them for neglect and elder abuse (although we’re not sure how the second one applies since he’s only 42). His case is “one of about 50 reported incidents in the past 12 months of sick, confused and homeless patients being left by ambulances” in downtown LA.
Thinking about buying yourself some new boobs? You might want to make sure you can handle the after effects. The NYT informs that breast augmentation doesn’t always involve a single surgery and there’s no warranty on your boobs. In fact, one third of women who get breast implants end up having another surgery within four to five years.
McDonald’s has decided to stop branding report card envelopes in a program that gave kids in Florida free food as a reward for good grades after a backlash from parents concerned about exploitive marketing. Teport cards came in an envelope (pictured, click to enlarge) telling kids to check their grades and redeem a free Happy Meal if they got all A’s and B’s or got good marks in “Citizenship” or attendance. The jacket also showed a smiling Ronald McDonald and mentioned McDonald’s several times.
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