Hot MedFax

Finally.  I'm not just messy.  I'm creative. That's according to a study , as written in an op-ed by Kathleen D. Vohs in Sunday's New York Times.  My desk may look like it's cluttered but I know where everything is, in what pile.  My husband, on the other hand, is -- there's no polite way to put it -- a slob.  Yet he, too, knows where everything is. The deck was always stacked against us messy people. But the times, they may be a-changin'. "The anthropologist Mary Douglas noted almost 50 years ago a connection between clean, open spaces and moral righteousness," Vohs writes. In another study, she points out, "People were found to associate chaotic wilderness with death." People who tend to be tidy, who have everything in neat stacks on their desks, or better yet, in their desks, have always been thought to be the kind you'd want working for you.  But something else is up. Vohs says in her studies her teams predicted "tha...

Sadly, our food inspection rules, though somewhat tightened recently, will not prevent you from getting sick if you consume a contaminated food that has somehow slipped through the ropes. Food-borne illnesses cause about one in six Americans to get very sick every year, with 128,000 hospitalizations, and an estimated 3,000 deaths, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as Deborah Kotz reports at The Boston Globe. My sister, who's never met a vegetable she didn't like, became seriously ill with food poisoning (doctors thought it might have been the arugula) about a week before her first son was due.  Happily, the baby was born healthy, though there was some concern initially that the contamination might have contributed to a neurological problem. Kotz writes that the introduction of federal laws to regulate food safety, including rules on how produce is grown, harvested, and distributed throughout the country has officials hoping "they w...