Author: Erin Elizabeth

It has to be that people simply don’t read the news. Or perhaps they think no one will notice when they do something completely outlandish…like this story. Taking a cue from others who have done the same thing and landed themselves on the front page of the mainstream media, an Irish drugmaker has jacked up the price of a painkiller that once cost a mere $138 (which is still astonomical to some) to almost $3,000 a bottle. That makes it 22 times more expensive than when the company acquired it in late 2013. And the worst part? The two...

In my video, Music as Medicine, I explored a study about how listening to Mozart can reduce allergic reactions. This reminded me of a similar study on humor, which I discuss in Laughter as Medicine. In the study, researchers took a group of people with dust mite allergies and directed half of them to watch a Charlie Chaplin video and the other half to watch the Weather Channel. The researchers then injected all subjects with dust mite poop. In the subjects who watched the humorous video, their allergic response was significantly reduced and this reduction lasted for a matter of hours. This suggests that “the induction of...