Read article – Quotes Samir Soneji, assistant professor of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, who argued at the the first-ever U.S. E-Cigarette Summit that e-cigarettes may reverse the negative perceptions of smoking among teens and young adults that have led to the dramatic declines in cigarette use. “The concern that I and others have is that e-cigarettes may re-normalize smoking and reduce the stigma of smoking in public,” says Soneji.

Read article – Researchers at the Geisel School of Medicine announced that two new studies of DAR-901, their investigational vaccine against tuberculosis (TB), have moved it to the forefront of new vaccines in development for global control of this deadly infectious disease. An earlier form of the vaccine was used in the DarDar Trial, a seven-year study in Tanzania sponsored by the U.S. National Institutes of Health involving patients with HIV infection who at birth had received BCG, the current tuberculosis vaccine.

Read article – Quotes Jay Buckey, professor of medicine and adjunct professor of engineering, about what would actually happen if if a human ended up in space without a suit. “If someone were in the vacuum space without a spacesuit, they would become unconscious very quickly — the main reason would be lack oxygen,” says Buckey.

Read article – Quotes David Jevsevar, chair and assistant professor of orthopaedics, in an article about how an international panel of surgeons and patients has challenged the effectiveness of arthroscopic surgery for patients with degenerative knee problems. Jevsevar, who also serves as chair of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) Council on Research and Quality, said the recommendation is in line with current evidence, but he also cautioned that generalizing a variety of randomized trials does not necessarily take into account the circumstances of individual patients. “Guidelines don’t apply to every patient,” Jevsevar says. “There’s always going to be an exception.”

Read article – An opinion piece co-authored by, H. Gilbert Welch, professor of medicine and of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, and professor of economics and adjunct professor of business administration; and Elliott Fisher, director of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, and professor of medicine and of community and family medicine; where they discuss the importance of driving down healthcare costs and making them more predictable to reduce the financial insecurity many Americans are facing.

Read article – Quotes Richard Barth, professor of surgery, in an article about how surgeons are using new methods to provide pain control after surgery, which they hope will reduce reliance on opioids. “I suspect we are going to see a major change in the number of opioids prescribed. There are lots of things we can do, with local anaesthetics in wounds that can be used as well as taking even some medications prior to surgery and using nonopioid alternatives like acetaminophen to help,” says Barth.

Read article – As a guest on “All Things Considered,” H. Gilbert Welch, professor of medicine and of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, and professor of economics, discusses how screening healthy people for thyroid cancer does more harm than good. “If you look early, you just find a whole new category of patients that has the disease but is never going to suffer from it at all,” says Welch. “But they will suffer from the treatment.”