MyHealth Beijing

I’m usually quite proud of my Irish ancestry, but one unfortunate vestige of that heritage is pasty white skin that sunburns quite easily. When my mother was pregnant with me and my twin brother, the doctors discovered a large melanoma [...]

Did you know that as much as 80 percent of your lifetime exposure to sunlight happens before the age of 18? This early sun exposure slowly causes DNA damage and puts us at risk for skin cancer later on. One [...]

Most of you already shave every day, so why not use an aftershave that includes sunscreen?

It’s been a tough couple weeks for medical tradition. First we had all women being warned their calcium supplements may do more harm than good; now the medical community is in a tizzy over the new recommendations against using the [...]

A Chinese team has designed a blood test which may be more accurate than the common AFP test. This hopefully will turn out to be truly effective, especially for China, as liver cancer from hepatitis B is extremely common.

Click on the arrow below to listen to this week’s podcast, or click here. OK, let’s get the really bad news out of the way first: a major study this week which followed 39,000 women over 19 years showed that not [...]

  Summer is in full swing, and many of us are enjoying one of life’s favorite past times — eating barbecued foods. Who can’t resist ears of corn, or a burger or hot dog? I certainly can’t, and have no [...]

A few weeks ago I wrote a piece discussing options for smoking cessation, and I specifically plugged varenicline, known as Chantix in most countries (“Champix” here in China), as being perhaps the most effective tool we doctors can now offer. [...]

UPDATE: please also check out my more recent review of sunscreens (June 2013) How many of you simply must have the strongest sunscreen? How many Americans are paying premium markups for SPF 70, 90 — or higher? Starting next summer [...]

The New York Times has an excellent series of articles, called “Forty Years’ War”, reviewing medicine’s efforts to fight cancer over the last forty years. This weekend’s article reviews the important issue of prevention of breast and prostate cancer. For [...]

Cancer is one of the last great scourges of humanity, and modern medicine has designed many tests that can screen for cancers. The most popular are mammograms for women, and prostate checks for men. The whole point of a screening [...]

The human body is truly a miracle, and every doctor should be humble enough to admit that there’s a lot we don’t know about how it all works, much less how best to cure disease. Cancer is one the last [...]