Causes Or Cures

Send us a textIn this episode of Causes or Cures, Dr. Eeks chats with Professor Maggie Wang about the first, real-time platform to predict the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines. The podcast is based on her and her team's work published in Nature Medicine in June of  2022.  The platform has the potential to be used for other vaccines as well. In the podcast, Professor Wang will discuss the research behind the platform, how vaccine effectiveness relates to "genetic distance"; how, when using the platform, the different COVID-19 vaccine platforms compare; why over 80% of variation in vaccine effectiveness is due to the genetic distance measure; how the platform can predict vaccine effectiveness by vaccine type and geopgraphical area; reverse vaccinology, and the larger, practical implications of this real-time platform. Professor Wang is founder and director of BethBio, a biotech company located in Hong Kong that focuses on vaccine development and translating frontier research results into vaccin

Send us a textIn this episode of Causes or Cures, Dr. Eeks chats with Dr. Hector Aguilar-Carreno about his and his team's research published in Nature, May'22 titled:  A TMPRSS2 inhibitor acts as a pan-SARS-CoV-2 prophylactic and therapeutic. In the podcast, he will break down the study and in an easy-to-understand way explain what TMPRSS2 is and how it relates to COVID-19 infection; the inhibitors and how they work; results when tested on cells and mice; why a nasal spray would be the most ideal way to administer this; public health implications, and where they are at in the research process.  Dr. Aguilar-Carreno is a virologist, professor and researcher with the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine. You can contact Dr. Eeks at bloomingwellness.com.Follow Dr. Eeks on Instagram here.Or Facebook here.Or Twitter.Subscribe to her newsletter here!Support the show

Send us a textIn this episode of Causes or Cures, Dr. Eeks chats with Dr. Tal Patalon, head of Kahn, Sagol, Maccabi (KSM), the Research and Innovation Center of Maccabi Healthcare Services in Israel about her recent study (still in preprint), titled: Naturally-acquired Immunity Dynamics against SARS-CoV-2 in Children and Adolescents, which you can access here. Currently, this is the largest, real-world, observational study looking at this research question during the Delta wave in Israel, with hundreds of thousands of kids and adolescents included in the study. In the podcast, she will discuss why she was interested in this research question, how she and her team conducted the study, what they discovered, any differences observed between reinfection rates without symptoms vs reinfection with symptoms in kids and adolescents, and since she is also a practicing clinician in Israel, what she is seeing from a clinical perspective and if that coincides with her research findings.  Hope you tune in to the conversat

Send us a textIn this episode of Causes or Cures, Dr. Eeks chats with Dr. Krista Varady about the evidence base for intermittent fasting (IF). Dr. Varady has conducted numerous randomized controlled trials on intermittent fasting and is with the Department of Kinesiology and Nutrition at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Her recent review on IF was published in Nature Reviews Endocrinology, which you can read here. You can follow her on Instagram here. In the podcast, she will discuss the evidence for intermittent fasting, its relationship to weight loss, if it helps with certain disease states, long-term results vs short-term results, different results in adults vs kids, if there is something "unique" about IF or if any health benefits come down to calorie restriction, and if she thinks it's a better diet to follow than others. Tune in! You can contact Dr. Eeks at bloomingwellness.com.Follow Dr. Eeks on Instagram here.Or Facebook here.Or Twitter.Subcribe to her newsletter here!Support the

Send us a textIn this episode of Causes or Cures, Dr. Eeks chats with Dr. Melissa Mialon about how the food industry influences public health policy and nutritional guidelines. She will describe the many characters of the food industry, what corporate political activity is and how they use it to influence health policy and nutritional guidelines, food labels, conflicts of interests involving decisionmakers of important nutritional guidelines, how the industry biases the scientific evidence base and what we can do to make sure the system is not biased towards food industry interests and profits. Dr. Mialon is a food engineer, a Research Assitant Professor at Trinity College, Dublin and an honorary Research Fellow at the University of San Paulo in Brazil. She is also an independent consultant currently working in France. She works for many health and consumer organizations, including the WHO, Blommberg Philanthropies and the Ministry of Health Ghana and is the co-cordinator of the Governance, Ethics and Conflic

Send us a textIn this episode of Causes or Cures, Dr. Eeks chats with Dr. Jerry Heindel about his and other researchers' recent reviews published in Biochemical Pharmacology on how chemicals in everyday products may be fueling the obesity epidemic here in the US and elsewhere. He will discuss what these chemicals are and how we get exposed; what the term "Obesogen" means and why that term should be on our radar; the potential mechanism of actions for how these chemical lead to obesity; when getting exposed to these chemicals puts us more at risk; the current evidence base for these chemicals fueling obesity, and things that we can do on both the individual and population level to reduce or mitigate our exposure. Dr. Heindel has his doctorate in biochemistry and worked in the area of reproductive biology and toxicology while a faculty member at the University of Texas Medical School and the Univeristy of Mississippi. He worked for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) f

Send us a text In this episode of Causes or Cures, Dr. Eeks chats with Dr. Dimie Ogoina about the human monkeypox outbreak that started in Nigeria in 2017, after the country had not seen a case for approximately 40 years. Dr. Ogoina is an infectious disease specialist and president of the Nigerian Infectious Disease Society whose hospital saw the first (index) case of human monkeypox in 2017. He has published several papers on this topic which can be found here. In this episode, he will describe the beginning of the monkeypox outbreak in Nigeria in 2017, symptoms, thoughts on transmission and things that struck him as unusual. He will talk about how Nigeria tried to warn the rest of the world that they were seeing something unusual. He will discuss similarities between what he observed (and treated) in Nigeria to what many countries around the world are now experiencing. He will also discuss the rate of mutations in this particular monkeypox virus, possible animal reservoirs, the link to the smallpox virus an

Send us a textIn this episode of Causes or Cures, Dr. Eeks chats with Dr. Vera Schluessel about her work on the cognitive abilities of fish, with a specific focus on her latest study published in Nature Scientific Reports, "Cichlids and Stingrays can add & subtract 'one' in the number space from 1 to 5. " Basically, she is going to tell us about fish doing math!  In the podcast she will discuss why she started researching the cognitive abilities of fish, why the general public rarely considers it and wrongly assumes "fish are dumb", some of her unique fish studies and results,  and the overall message she hopes to convey to the general public. Dr. Schluessel runs the Schluessel Cognition Lab at the Institute of Zoologie at the University of Bonn in Germany. You can contact Dr. Eeks at bloomingwellness.com.Follow Dr. Eeks on Instagram here.Or Facebook here.Or Twitter.Subcribe to her newsletter here!Support the show

Send us a textContinuing the exploration of industry's influence on healthcare and health policy, in this episode of Causes or Cures, Dr. Eeks chats with Dr. Joel Lexchin and Dr. Lisa Parker about the influence drug companies have over patient groups. They will describe what patient groups are (why they are needed & the variety of work they do), why drug companies have a vested interest in patient groups, how drug companies fund and influence the groups (and sometimes even create them) and how the groups influence healthcare policy. They will also discuss practical things that can be done to make the overall health system put patients over profit.  Dr. Lexchin is a professor at York University, where he teaches pharmaceutical policy, an emergency medicine physician, a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, a member of the Ontario Drug Quality and Therapeutics Committee and was chair of the Drugs and Pharmacotherapy Committee of the Ontario Medical Association. Dr. Parker is an honorary se

Send us a textIn this episode of Causes or Cures, Dr. Eeks chats with Dr. David Smith about the history and future of psychedelic medicine. He will discuss early research on psychedelics (including experiments the CIA ran), the potential health benefits and disorders they may treat, any potential side effects we should worry about, the current state of research, and why he remains cautiously optimistic. (You'll also hear about some of your favorite bands and how their contributions kept some of the earliest clinics open.) Dr. David Smith is one of the founders of the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics, founded in 1967 during the Summer of Love. He is a recognized national leader in the treatment of addictive disease and the psychopharmacology of drugs. Now in his eighties, he continues to serve as medical director for several medical centers and is chair of addiction medicine for a residential center for teens with substance abuse. He is a diplomat of the American Board of Addiction Medicine and the California

Send us a textIn this episode of Causes or Cures, Dr. Eeks chats with Dr. Mathias Schmidt and Dr. Nils Gassen about their recent research published in Science Advances that involves a protein in the brain that may link autophagy to metabolism to weight control and the fight against obesity. In the podcast, they will discuss why they are interested in obesity research, why they have a specific interest in this protein, what they knew about the protein before the study and what they learned, what autophagy is, how it is linked to the specific protein, how autophagy is linked to metabolism, and what their research might mean for weight control and the fight against obesity going forward.. Dr. Schmidt is the Research Group Leader of the Neurobiology of Stress Resilience at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, Germany and Dr. Gassen is a Research Group Leader at the University of Bonn Medical Center in Germany.  You can contact Dr. Eeks at bloomingwellness.com.Follow Dr. Eeks on Instagram here.Or Face

Send us a textIn this episode of Causes or Cures, Dr. Eeks chats with Cheryl Juaire, founder of Team Sharing, INC.  Cheryl will discuss Team Sharing, a not-for-profit for parents who have lost their kids to substance abuse disorder, including opioids, and why she started it. She will talk about what it was like to navigate loss and grief after losing two of her sons to the opioid epidemic and how Team Sharing helps parents and family members navigate through grief. She will also discuss what she thinks the public health response to the opioid epidemic should look like, and she will talk about what it was like to personally address the Sackler Family, owners of the disgraced pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma that led a wide and false marketing campaign that misinformed patients and providers about the addictive potential of prescribed opioids. (If you are interested in joining a virtual 5K on May 7th to help raise money for TeamSharing, the sign-up link is here! For a great cause!)You can contact Dr. Eeks a

Send us a textIn this episode of Causes or Cures, Dr. Eeks chats with Dr. Brad Pickering about COVID-19 spillover from humans into other animals, particularly his work on viral spillover into white-tailed deer in Canada, as well as the case he and his team discovered that might be the first, identifiable case of deer to human transmission of the virus. He will discuss the unique mutations in the deer viral samples, the potential first case of deer to human transmission (how it was identified and how it might have occurred), vaccine effectiveness against the deer viral samples and what this potential spillover and spillback might mean for managing the COVID-19 virus going forward. Dr. Pickering is the head of the Special Pathogens Unit at the National Center for Foreign Animal Disease for the Canadian Government. You can read his study here. You can contact Dr. Eeks at bloomingwellness.com.Follow Dr. Eeks on Instagram here.Or Facebook here.Or Twitter.Subcribe to her newsletter here!Support the show

Send us a textContinuing our exploration of the pharmaceutical industry's influence on health and health policy at a global level, in this podcast, Dr. Eeks has a conversation with Emily Rickard about her research on how the industry influences the UK's All-Party Parliamentary Groups. She will explain what the All-Party Parliamentary Groups, particularly the health-related ones, are and what they do. She'll talk about both the direct and indirect ways the pharmaceutical industry influences those groups and why that matters from both a transparency issue and a health-policy one. Emily is a researcher and doctoral student with the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Bath. You can contact Dr. Eeks at bloomingwellness.com.Follow Dr. Eeks on Instagram here.Or Facebook here.Or Twitter.Subcribe to her newsletter here!Support the show

Send us a textRates of dementia, including Alzheimer's Disease, are only increasing in developed nations as scientists race to find treatments and identify preventive strategies. In this episode of Causes or Cures, Dr. Eeks chats with Dr. Margaret Gatz about her research published in the Journal of the Alzheimer's Association titled: Prevalence of dementia and mild cognitive impairment in indigenous Bolivian forager-horticulturalists.  In the podcast she will discuss these indigenous populations, including their lifestyle, diet and educational levels, how she conducted her research to assess their risks and rates of dementia, how their rates compare to the developed world, some intriguing findings, and what developed nations with growing rates of Alzheimer's disease can potentially learn from them in terms of risk factors for dementia and prevention. Dr. Gatz is a professor of psychology, gerontology and preventive medicine at the University of Southern California's Lenoard Davis School of

Send us a textIn this episode of Causes or Cures, Dr. Eeks chats with Dr. Andrea Saltelli about his recent paper on regulatory capture titled: Science, the Endless Frontier of Regulatory Capture. He will discuss what regulatory capture is, what cultural capture is, what an epistemic ladder of corruption is and how all of these things impact science, influence policy and ultimately, all of us. He will use specific case studies to highlight elements of regulatory capture in science that make it easier to understand. He will also discuss ways to make regulatory capture less of an issue for science and subsequent policies. Dr. Saltelli has done a lot of research on physical chemistry, environmental science and applied statistics. His main area of focus is sensitivity analysis of model output, where statistical tools are used to interpret outputs from mathematical and computational models, and sensitivity auditing, an extension of sensitivity analysis applied to the entire evidence-generating process from a policy

Send us a textIn this episode of Causes or Cures, Dr. Eeks chats with Dr. Janet Currie about the factors that caused the opioid epidemic. They will discuss her recent research published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, "The Opioid Epidemic was Not Caused by Economic Distress but by Factors that Could be More Rapidly Addressed." In this podcast, she will discuss the history of the opioid epidemic, how it started and explain why prescriptions for opioids and healthcare market policies are what fueled the epidemic, not economic factors. Dr. Currie is an economist and Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University and the co-director of Princeton's Center for Health and Wellbeing. She is also codirector of the Program on Families and Children at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She was named a Nomis Distinguished Scientist in 2019 and 1 of the top 10 women in economics by the World Economics Forum in 2015. She has served as the Presi

Send us a textIn this episode of Causes or Cures, Dr. Eeks chats with Dr. Joel Lexchin about his recent research published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine titled: A Ray of Sunshine: Transparency in Physician-Industry Relationships Is Not Enough. He will discuss what the Sunshine Act was designed to accomplish in terms of being transparent about physician-industry relationships, what it actually did, and how it did or did not change physician behavior, industry behavior and consumer behavior. Dr. Lexchin is a professor at the York University Faculty of Health where he taught pharmaceutical policy, an emergency medicine physician, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto. He is a Fellow in the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and the author of over 160 peer-reviewed publications. He was a member of the Ontario Drug Quality and Therapeutics Committee and chair of the Drugs and Pharmacotherapy Committee of the Ontario Medical Associa

Send us a textExploring the Spiritual RealmWhere spiritual belief meets health, culture, and skepticism Disclaimer: This episode discusses spiritual and metaphysical beliefs that are not evidence-based medical treatments. Nothing in this conversation is medical or health advice. If you have a health concern, please seek care from a licensed clinician. This is entertainment only. In this episode of Causes or Cures, Dr. Eeks chats with Msgr Stephen Rossetti about his work as an Exorcist. He has conducted hundreds of exorcisms. In this podcast, he will describe what it means to be possessed and how possessions manifest, how one discerns possession from an underlying mental or physiological issue, who Spiritual Sensitives are and why they are important, what happens during an exorcism and some of his scarier moments, how long exorcisms take and what he says to the doubters. Msgr. Rossetti is the author of A Diary of an American Exorcist. He has a Ph.D in psychology and is a licensed psychologist, is a graduate of

Send us a textIn this episode of Causes or Cures, Dr. Eeks chats with Dr. Sergio Sismondo, a professor of philosophy at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada about his work titled "Epistemic Corruption, the Pharmaceutical Industry and the Body of Medical Science" published in Frontiers Research Metrics and Analytics. His years of empirical research has shed light on the various ways drug companies influence the practice of medicine and the body of medical science for profit. His research also allowed him to develop a framework for understanding the relationship between politics and pharmaceutical companies. In addition to his research, he has published two books titled: An Introduction to Science and Technology and Ghost-Managed Medicine, Big Pharma's Invisible Hands.(Keep in mind that this is a podcast. It's a conversation and/or philosophical discussion, not news.)You can contact Dr. Eeks at bloomingwellness.com.Follow Dr. Eeks on Instagram here.Or Facebook here.Or Twitter.Read Mani