Defamation lawsuits were brought into the limelight with the Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard lawsuit, and physicians can learn a lot from the questions brought into the case, and most importantly, that even if you win the courtroom case, as Depp did, it can represent a loss in your real life.

The story of David Ho, MD, who contracted the COVID-19 virus after attending a conference on the virus(!), but who lived COVID-free for two years beforehand. The Paxlovid he took eliminated the symptoms and he was free from the virus after testing. However, a few days later, he felt sick again and tested himself. Lo and behold, COVID returned. Is it the drug or is it the virus causing this phenomenon?

Burkholderia pseudomallei bacteria showed up in four patients in Georgia, Kansas, Minnesota, and Texas in 2021, despite the bacterium typically associated with travel to tropical and subtropical areas like Thailand and Malaysia. The case was cracked when researchers found an essential oil spray that contained B. pseudomallei in the home of a 4-year-old boy who died from complications of the melioidosis outbreak.

Giant cell arteritis (GCA) is one of the most dangerous rheumatologic conditions, and mortality rates among patients with the condition in Canada’s Ontario province has researchers very concerned without any explanation for the recent increases in mortality they documented. MedPage Today shares the report from Arthritis Care & Research.

In this update to its 2014 recommendation, the USPSTF concluded “with moderate certainty that the harms of beta carotene supplementation outweigh the benefits for the prevention of cardiovascular disease or cancer.”

The authors investigated the effect of adding radiotherapy to neoadjuvant chemotherapy on survival in patients with Stage III-N2 non-small cell lung cancer. Analysis included 1,175 patients diagnosed between 2004 and 2015; 799 (68.0%) underwent neoadjuvant CRT and 376 (32.0%) underwent neoadjuvant CT. Adding radiotherapy to chemotherapy showed a slightly higher median OS than chemotherapy alone (51 vs. 47 months, respectively), and a higher median CSS (75 vs. 59 months, respectively). However, these differences were not statistically significant.