Promises That Seem Too Good To Be True (And Probably Are) Abound In Health Care. So How Do You Protect Yourself?

The FDA, which has been cracking down on fraudulent health claims in recent months, offers a website that tracks the more pervasive scams. In other public health news, neonatal care, suicide, social media and rage, parenting, blood transfusions, and more.

The Washington Post: How To Stay Up-To-Date On Medical Scams, Quackery, Deadly Treatments
A “cure” that seems too good to be true. A doctor who profits from ineffective or dangerous “treatments.” A product that doesn’t do what it says. All three are health-care frauds — and they can cheat you out of more than money. But how can you arm yourself against these hucksters and scams? The Food and Drug Administrations’s Health Fraud Scams website is a good start. (Blakemore, 2/23)

The Washington Post: ‘Every 30 Seconds Another Alarm Is Going Off’: Neonatal ICUs Can Take Their Toll On Parents
For the casual visitor, the most striking thing about a hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit is the noise. An orchestra of alarms beeps incessantly. The lights are dim, the shades are drawn and the air inside the NICU’s sterile environment is thick with parental anxiety. When babies are born prematurely or sick, they are separated from parents, hooked up to tubes and wires, and cared for in transparent incubators. To understand what is happening to their children, family members must learn a strange new medical vernacular while they await discharge. (Durairaj, 2/23)

The Washington Post: Florida Doctor And Mom Free Hess Exposes Suicide Tips Hidden In Clips On YouTube And YouTube Kids
Free Hess, a pediatrician and mother, had learned about the chilling videos over the summer when another mom spotted one on YouTube Kids. She said that minutes into the clip from a children’s video game, a man appeared on the screen — offering instructions on how to commit suicide. “I was shocked,” Hess said, noting that since then, the scene has been spliced into several more videos from the popular Nintendo game Splatoon on YouTube and YouTube Kids, a video app for children. Hess, from Ocala, Fla., has been blogging about the altered videos and working to get them taken down amid an outcry from parents and child health experts, who say such visuals can be damaging to children. (Bever, 2/24)

NPR: Social Media Spreads Rage But Kindness Can Stop It In Its Tracks
Even if you're not aware of it, it's likely that your emotions will influence someone around you today. This can happen during our most basic exchanges, say on your commute to work. "If someone smiles at you, you smile back at them," says sociologist Nicholas Christakis of Yale University. "That's a very fleeting contagion of emotion from one person to another." But it doesn't stop there. Emotions can spread through social networks almost like the flu or a cold. And, the extent to which emotions can cascade is eye-opening. (Aubrey, 2/25)

USA Today: Parent Coaches: Why Moms And Dads, Including Celebrities, Hire Them
Katie Zimmerman has two daughters who are 8 months apart. How? She adopted a little girl and then found out she was pregnant. The most challenging part of having two kids so close in age? Getting them to sleep, she said. For months, Zimmerman was constantly exhausted because one child was always awake. To find relief and advice, she didn't call her mom or consult other parents. She called Chesea Kunde, a professional parent coach. (Haller, 2/24)

Bloomberg: The Bloody Tale Of Ambrosia, The Startup That Wants To Slow Aging 
In 2016, a tiny startup announced an experiment that seemed equal parts medieval sorcery and science fiction: It would inject older people with the blood plasma of young donors in a bid to slow aging. For three years, Ambrosia Chief Executive Officer Jesse Karmazin charged patients $8,000 to infuse one liter of plasma as part of an unorthodox, crowd-funded clinical trial. Karmazin promised extraordinary results—going so far as to proclaim in media interviews that his treatment “comes pretty close” to immortality. (Carville, 2/25)

NPR: To Adapt To Adversity, Learn To Have A Flexible Sense Of Self
What if we told you that you could learn a lot about handling adversity from the life of a bug? In their explorations of humans and how we interact with the world around us, the team that makes NPR's Invisibilia stumbled on a surprising fact about the insect world — one that could inspire a new way of looking at ourselves. The epic destruction wrought by swarms of locusts is downright biblical. Exodus tells of a plague that left nothing green in all of Egypt, and we've seen these harbingers of destruction at work in modern day Australia, Argentina and Israel, just to name a few. But for centuries, one essential piece of information about these strange insects eluded scientists: Where do they come from? (Simstrom, 2/22)

The Wall Street Journal: Your Avocados And Olives Are Pricier Because Fat Is In Fashion
Farmers around the globe are struggling to keep up with an increasing global appetite for fats that are perceived as healthy, leading to long-term disruptions in food prices. From Mexico to Norway to New Zealand, avocado growers, fish farmers and butter producers are struggling to increase output so they can meet surging demand, but environmental constraints and other challenges are limiting how much they can churn out. (Craymer, 2/25)

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