Super Bowl Pre-Game Health Checklist

You wouldn’t think that watching burly guys with plastic bubbles on their heads slamming together would have a lot of impact on your health, would you? Au contraire–the world of health science is mesmerized by what I call the Super Bowl Effect. Almost every year a new finding is released by researchers that shows just […]

Expensive Sterile Saline, or Tapwater? It’s a Wash!

If you grew up in the rural South like Doc Gurley, your childhood memories include such everyday events as peeling all the epithelium off both knees and elbows, stubbing the entire top off both big toes, and then sliding into so much dirt with said injuries that the injured skin looked like a new, high-tech […]

Was Heath Ledger Snoring? Or Was It Something Worse?

There’s only one way to feel about the sudden death of Heath Ledger–what a tragic loss of youth, life, and talent. While we may never know what actually happened, the story about his death raises some important opportunities to learn, and, hopefully, prevent future deaths like this. First point: the medicines that were found in […]

How To Break Bad News

Dr. Judah Folkman died this week in Boston. News organizations used the occasion to report on his decades-long cancer research career. Given his status as a distant, non-celebrity, non-Nobel surgeon, you may be asking yourself why you, personally, should care about his death. Here’s why.

We were in our second year of medical […]

Yeowza! Important Bad News!

Typically, health news is a litany of faux fears. You know what I mean, alarmist stuff that makes it seem like an act of insurance-revoking foolhardiness merely to leave the house without a respirator, a bottle of thermonuclear disinfectant, and a NASA-approved re-entry pod. In a surprising twist, here is a truly alarming bit of […]

Okay, I’m Obsessed

For all you loyal Doc Gurley website visitors (yes, all two of you), you may be thinking this is another article about Dave Barry. But nooo. Just to prove how fickle my fantasy stalker-affections are, I’m outing myself right here, right now, on international Internet, as being obsessed yet again–only this time with a face. […]