VSED: The Downsides of Fasting for Ending Life
What are the pros and cons of voluntarily stopping eating and drinking to end your life?
What are the pros and cons of voluntarily stopping eating and drinking to end your life?
Even under hospice with excellent palliative care, some spend their last months in uncontrollable suffering. What can be done in places in the United States that outlaw physician-assisted dying?
Hospice is often framed as “giving up,” but, ironically, hospice patients sometimes actually live longer
What happens when real yoga is compared to sham yoga?
Is yoga better than other types of exercise, better than nothing but similar to other physical activity, or not beneficial even when it’s compared to doing nothing at all?
Contrary to popular perception, the evidence for even the most well-founded benefits of mindfulness meditation is not entirely conclusive.
Anti-inflammatory diets can be effective in alleviating chronic pain syndromes.
What effect do fasting and a plant-based diet have on TBI and migraines?
Why is the incidence of side effects from statins so low in clinical trials but appear to be so high out in the real world?
What are the risks versus benefits of drinking kombucha?
Sham surgery trials prove that procedures like nonemergency stents offer no benefit for angina pain—only risk to millions of patients.
There are demonstrably no benefits to the hundreds of thousands of angioplasty and stent procedures performed outside of an emergency setting. They don’t prevent heart attacks, enable you to live longer, or even help with symptoms any more than placebo (fake) surgery.
Losing weight can reduce sciatica, hypertension, and cancer risk, and reverse type 2 diabetes.
Various fasting regimens have been attempted for inflammatory autoimmune diseases such as lupus, ankylosing spondylitis, chronic urticaria, mixed connective-tissue disease, glomerulonephritis, and multiple sclerosis, as well as osteoarthritis and fibromyalgia.
Fasting, followed by a plant-based diet, is put to the test for autoimmune inflammatory joint disease.
Double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trials on berries and the first clinical study on the effects of berries on arthritis.
There have been at least eight randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials of ginger for pain.
What happened in states after medical marijuana laws were passed? Did opioid overdoses go up, stay the same, or go down?
We shouldn’t ever swallow aloe vera, but how does using it topically for a chronic inflammatory autoimmune disease compare to steroids?
Are the health benefits associated with apple consumption simply due to other healthy behaviors among apple-eaters?
Excessive breast compression during mammography may not improve image quality and can cause unnecessary pain.
What did the 2017 National Academies of Sciences’ 468-page report conclude about cannabis?
What works better against aphthous ulcers? Honey applied with a cotton swab three times a day after meals was compared head-to-head against an over-the-counter soothing pain-relieving paste and a prescription steroid cream.
Vitamin D supplements are put to the test for fibromyalgia.
A daily dose of 4,000 IU of vitamin D is recommended for elders at high risk for falling to improve muscle strength and balance, though there is something that works even better.
An eighth of a teaspoon of ground ginger power is tested head-to-head against the leading drug for the alleviation of painful periods.
Five cents’ worth of seaweed a day may dramatically improve a major cause of disability and compromised quality of life among women.
The aspirin compounds naturally found in plant foods may help explain the lower cancer rates among those eating plant-based diets.
The benefits of taking a daily aspirin must be weighed against the risk of internal bleeding.
A quarter- to a half-teaspoon a day of powdered ginger can be as pain-relieving as ibuprofen, without the risk of damage to the intestinal lining.
Can the consumption of sesame seeds improve the clinical signs and symptoms of arthritis?
Lifestyle approaches aren’t only safer and cheaper—they can work better, because they let us treat the actual cause of the disease.
Powdered ginger can be a highly effective, cheap, easy-to-use, safer treatment for nausea, migraine headaches, and menstrual blood loss and pain. Does it also work for IBS intestinal cramping?
Diabetics suffering from nerve pain for years are cured within days with a plant-based diet.
Cow’s milk proteins can pass through breast milk—which may explain why maternal dairy-free diets are so effective in treating infant colic.
By preventing colon spasms, peppermint oil can both reduce the pain and discomfort of colonoscopies for the patient, as well as make insertion and withdrawal of scope easier for the doctor.
The anti-inflammatory effect of curcumin, the pigment in the spice turmeric, was put to the test to see if it could reduce postoperative pain and fatigue after surgery.
The fat-burning properties of brown adipose tissue can be boosted by cold exposure, certain flavor molecules, and arginine-rich foods.
More than two-thirds of Americans over age 60 have diverticulosis, but it was nearly unknown a century ago, and remained extremely rare among populations eating whole food plant-based diets.
Peppermint essential oil should be considered the first-line treatment for IBS.