Emergency Physician, Educator, Researcher, interested in the microbiome, evolution, and medicine
Are we masters of our own fate… or have our brains been zombified by microbes? To learn more about Cordyceps and similar mind-controlling parasites, watch Zombie parasites on YouTube. Dethlefson and colleagues wrote that “from the microbial perspective…the distinction between human health and disease is important only as far as […]
I took the above photo from 18,700 feet near the summit of Cotopaxi, an (active) volcano in the Ecuadorean Andes. We were suffering from a bit of exertional and hypoxic stress in this photo. On the other hand, native people of the Andes can cope with hypoxia at altitude better […]
Listen to this audio link by the Canadian born rapper Baba Brinkman: all the way to senescence (with lyrics): http://music.bababrinkman.com/track/senescence Understanding age-related risk of death and age-related disease are the result of tradeoffs and occur because of evolved life history traits. We are going to cover evolutionary hypotheses of senescence […]
The 2016 UNM Evolutionary Medicine course starts tomorrow, August 23rd, 2016! Starting tomorrow, we will peel away conventional preconceptions about health and disease, using the lens of evolution to better understand our humanity and our well-being. Students will learn: Amazing case studies that show why evolution matters to real patients. […]
Are we a mammal-microbial collective? Should we think of our interaction with our resident microbes as a harmonious, mutually helpful partnership, or a relationship gone sour? In this podcast, I will lay out my case for why I think the (mutualistic) holobiont concept is often wrong headed and misleading. Here […]
This week a study by Stein and colleagues was published in the New England Journal of Medicine featuring differences in asthma risk between genetically similar Amish and Hutterite children living in the US. The main difference between these two farming groups is their exposure to farm animals. Amish have single […]
This is the EvolutionMedicine ‘cast #4, a bonus podcast for Saturday July 23th – evolution meets evidence-based medicine. This podcast is based on a presentation I gave at last month’s ISEMPH conference. A couple of weeks ago, we discussed how an evolutionary hypothesis regarding sepsis physiology was ultimately vindicated by […]
This is the EvolutionMedicine ‘cast #3, entitled The New Normal, for Wednesday July 13th. This podcast is based on a presentation I gave at last year’s ISEMPH 2015 conference. I actually recorded this audio two weeks ago. That is why it is mis-identified as podcast #1. It is indeed ‘cast […]
This is the EvolutionMedicine ‘cast #2, for July 4, 2016. This is a story worth telling. Sepsis is an important cause of mortality, causing an estimated 60,000 deaths yearly. Sepsis is also expensive to treat, and is associated with expensive medical procedures, such as life support and intensive care. Despite […]
I am launching a new podcast in evolutionary medicine. It will be available here at EvolutionMedicine.com for now. We plan to have this podcast on iTunes and other platforms, but not yet! Here is the inaugural EvolutionMedicine ‘cast: The State of the Science of Evolutionary Medicine. Many more to […]
EvolutionMedicine 