Listen to story – As a guest on “Northland Morning,” Shawn O’Leary, an Urban Health Scholars Advisor and a member of the Boise Forte Band of Ojibwe, discusses his innovative idea to start a spring break service project that brings first-year medical and public health students to work with Native American communities in Minnesota.

Read article – Quotes Steven Woloshin, professor of medicine, community and family medicine, and of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, about what it means when the FDA designates an experimental approach with “breakthrough status.” “When you hear the word breakthrough, it’s understandable to think that it means something definitively or a game changer,” says Woloshin. “But it gets confusing because the FDA uses it in a very different way.”

Read article – Quotes H. Gilbert Welch, professor of medicine, community and family medicine, and of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, about how getting your own blood tests is part of the larger negative trend—testing people who aren’t really sick. The article also quotes Norman Paradis, professor of medicine, who calls the model of offering a wide assortment of tests a recipe for disaster.

Read article – Steven Woloshin, professor of medicine, community and family medicine, and of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, is quoted about how press releases, popular media, and even some journal articles routinely inflate expectations for future therapies based on early findings that probably will never turn into cures. “This is a problem throughout medical research and reporting on medical research,” says Woloshin.

Read article – Quotes Sunny Jung Kim, postdoctoral fellow at the Dartmouth Psychiatric Research Center, who co-authored a recent study on health advertorials, a form of native advertising made to look like reported content in a publication or on television, and found that they work to deceive their viewers and lower consumer awareness.

Read article – James Leiter, professor of physiology and neurobiology and of medicine, who was the lead investigator of the study that found serotonin, is quoted about a neurotransmitter in the brain, shortens periods of apnea and promotes inspiration.

Read article – Cites figures from the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, which showed average Medicare spending in 2012 for a Rochester, Minn., resident was $7,325, compared to the $11,239 average in Jacksonville, Fla.

Read article – Quotes Lisa Schwartz, professor of medicine, community and family medicine, and of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice (TDI), about how she and colleague Steven Woloshin, professor of medicine, community and family medicine, and of TDI, reviewed the studies that weight loss drug Contrave’s manufacturer, Orexigen Therapetutics, used to gain approval of the drug from the Food and Drug Administration. “The studies show that Contrave caused many people to feel sick,” says Schwartz.