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PA Daily Herald

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5 days ago

Tiny fish offer great nutrition - Prince Albert Daily Herald This week, I write from Tokyo, where small fish are eaten with remarkable regularity. A traditional Japanese breakfast includes such fish – salted, dried, grilled and served cold – consumed head-to-tail, bones, eyeballs and all. Small sardines are tucked into lunch boxes. Convenience stores sell little fish for snacking. It’s common to add sardines or

Tiny fish offer great nutrition


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PA Daily Herald

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1 week ago

Feeling alone? Take comfort – you’re in excellent company - Prince Albert Daily Herald It’s a sad irony. But the truth is, loneliness is one of the most crowded experiences in modern society. Some prefer their own company and are emotionally stable. There’s no harm in letting them be. But there is an astonishingly high number of people who can be called “situational loners”. These are people who may

Feeling alone? Take comfort - you’re in excellent company


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PA Daily Herald

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2 weeks ago

Statins, Side Effects, and the Silence About Choice - Prince Albert Daily Herald There’s a common organizational saying: structure drives behaviour. In institutional theory, it’s called path dependence. Once a structure or pattern is established, it becomes self-reinforcing. This is a problem in medicine. Researchers and specialists become deeply immersed in their own areas of expertise. They network within tight knowledge clusters. They protect their territory. And when

Statins, Side Effects, and the Silence About Choice


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PA Daily Herald

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3 weeks ago

Gold medals are not the goal in health - Prince Albert Daily Herald The Olympics showcase people pushing to their limits. Athletes soar, leap, slide and score! Watching from the couch, feet up, drink in hand, we marvel at these feats. In the natural world, certain animals push their limits too. Some migratory birds can fly for days – sometimes weeks – without landing. The bar-tailed godwit, for

Gold medals are not the goal in health


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PA Daily Herald

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1 month ago

Medicine keeps getting heart disease wrong - Prince Albert Daily Herald History has a way of humbling doctors. When my father, Dr. W. Gifford-Jones, was a student at Harvard Medical School in the late 1940s, one of his professors – Paul Dudley White – told the class something that would be unthinkable today: heart attacks used to be rare. So rare, in fact, doctors at Massachusetts

Medicine keeps getting heart disease wrong


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PA Daily Herald

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1 month ago

A century-old problem we still ignore - Prince Albert Daily Herald In 1982, PubMed, a research database, indexed 740 papers with “vitamin D” in the title. In 2020, there were 5,566. Clearly interest has increased. Today, vitamin D is studied as a system-wide regulator and an essential component of skeletal, immune, metabolic, cardiovascular, neurological, and inflammatory processes. But even a century ago, nutritionists feared the dangers

A century-old problem we still ignore


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PA Daily Herald

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1 month ago

Plant-based alternatives to HRT - Prince Albert Daily Herald Hot flashes, disrupted sleep, decreased sex drive, and irrational urges to kick your husband for no good reason. The menopausal transition can make life hard to manage! Many women find themselves weighing the pros and cons of hormone replacement therapy (HRT). But not everyone can take HRT, and not everyone wants to. Interest is growing

Plant-based alternatives to HRT


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PA Daily Herald

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1 month ago

Stronger from the inside out - Prince Albert Daily Herald Why is it the face lines of aging men can make them handsome while a wrinkled female face needs improvement? That double standard should be put to bed. Nevertheless, looking and feeling younger is not a cosmetic matter, for women or men. Studies show that “feeling younger”, or perceiving oneself as younger, correlates with better

Stronger from the inside out


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PA Daily Herald

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2 months ago

When common sense goes up in flames - Prince Albert Daily Herald By any measure, what happened in Switzerland a couple weeks ago is a human catastrophe. A room filled with young people full of promise was turned into a scene of lifelong grief. Families shattered. Futures erased. Survivors left with horrible scars. Authorities will do what they must. Investigators will trace the ignition point. Building inspectors

When common sense goes up in flames


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PA Daily Herald

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2 months ago

Blocking pain without breaking lives - Prince Albert Daily Herald I hear paternal grumbling at what I’m about to say. Dr. Gifford-Jones often warned we are a “nation of wimps” when it comes to pain. He believed we were losing the toughening effect that ordinary aches and setbacks once gave us. Furthermore, anyone who has run a marathon, climbed a mountain, or given birth knows

Blocking pain without breaking lives


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PA Daily Herald

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2 months ago

Family history makes for a good story - Prince Albert Daily Herald How many of us can recall our grandfathers leaning back in a favourite chair, saying, “Let me tell you something you should remember.” What followed was usually a story that had grown larger with time, about hardship, happenstance, or a decision made when the stakes were high. On the other hand, if your grandmother was

Family history makes for a good story


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PA Daily Herald

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2 months ago

Put some perspective in the Christmas stocking - Prince Albert Daily Herald How many times in 2025 did you complain about something? And with good reason! But this is the time of year for setting aside our thoughts about the issues driving us crazy. Take a step back during the holidays and reflect on what really counts. Health and happiness. That’s the bottom line. My Christmas wish

Put some perspective in the Christmas stocking


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PA Daily Herald

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2 months ago

Caring for a parent with dementia - Prince Albert Daily Herald Last week I shared thoughts on aging parents. Many of you wrote asking for more, particularly about the challenges of caring for a parent with dementia. It’s not an easy assignment, but here is a list of practical advice. 1. Start legal, financial, and medical planning now, not later. The experts are emphatic on this:

Caring for a parent with dementia


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PA Daily Herald

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3 months ago

Longevity isn’t for the faint of heart - Prince Albert Daily Herald I have been lucky as my parents aged past 90. My father, Dr. W. Gifford-Jones, stayed vibrant longer than most people dare hope. In his nineties he was still hopping on planes, giving talks across Canada, researching and writing his next column, and scheming about the next promotion or the next stunt that would amuse

Longevity isn’t for the faint of heart


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PA Daily Herald

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3 months ago

What we got wrong about independence - Prince Albert Daily Herald What’s happened, that we feed our children a single definition of success? Grow up and leave home, climb the ladder, buy a house, and live an “independent” life. At the same time, aging parents assert they must never become a burden on their grown children. These aspirations for self-reliance are ingrained in our concept of

What we got wrong about independence


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PA Daily Herald

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3 months ago

Hernias are an age-old problem - Prince Albert Daily Herald Hernias are an ancient ailment. And modern medicine still debates the best ways to repair or live with them. One of the earliest references appears in the Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from around 1550 BCE. The treatment for hernias was to push them back into place, in techniques described by Hippocrates. Galen, a

Hernias are an age-old problem


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PA Daily Herald

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3 months ago

Why big science matters - Prince Albert Daily Herald We applaud people solving problems who are focused, efficient, and fast. But I was recently reminded that progress doesn’t always follow a straight line. Before investigators can conduct studies that yield breakthroughs, they often need others to finance and build major research infrastructure. It takes time, with various stops and starts, different collaborations often involving

Why big science matters


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PA Daily Herald

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4 months ago

The strange power of fake pills - Prince Albert Daily Herald I have been sorting through unpublished Gifford-Jones columns. Among them, I found a dusty clipping from a Reader’s Digest article by Robert A. Siegel and a rough draft of this week’s column. In it, we find a glimpse into a lecture hall at Harvard Medical School 75 years ago, and the teachings of Dr. Henry

The strange power of fake pills


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PA Daily Herald

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4 months ago

It’s Halloween, and here we go again - Prince Albert Daily Herald It is a night when we willfully indulge children in alarming amounts of things we call treats. Halloween is a lot of fun for kids, and for adults too. But otherwise intelligent people are facilitating the celebration of a tradition that has swerved in the wrong direction. What could be high-quality, entertaining time together for

It’s Halloween, and here we go again


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PA Daily Herald

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4 months ago

It’s flu season but it’s not the flu - Prince Albert Daily Herald “The superfluous,” said Voltaire, the French philosopher, “is a very necessary thing.” Alas, his thinking predated our understanding of the norovirus. The norovirus is one of the most common viruses on the planet – yet it seems to be doing nothing useful, let alone necessary. It’s just making hundreds of millions of people worldwide sick

It’s flu season but it’s not the flu


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PA Daily Herald

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5 months ago

How to protect against uterine cancer - Prince Albert Daily Herald Why do so many women ignore one of the most obvious warning signs of uterine cancer? It’s a cancer that usually announces itself early. But women wait, or brush off the warning signs, and that allows the disease to take hold. Uterine cancer, also called endometrial cancer, is not rare. And it can strike anyone.

How to protect against uterine cancer


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PA Daily Herald

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5 months ago

Fights over drugs have enduring meaning - Prince Albert Daily Herald Every so often, history taps you on the shoulder. That happened to me recently when I discovered a book on the science, culture, and regulation of drugs by Professor Lucas Richert, a historian of pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The book devotes its entire first chapter to none other than my father, Dr. Ken

Fights over drugs have enduring meaning


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PA Daily Herald

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5 months ago

Why is information so hidden in healthcare? - Prince Albert Daily Herald Several weeks ago, I wrote about the importance of factual debates. This week let’s talk about transparency. It’s one of those words that gets thrown around in health discussions. Politicians promise it. Hospital administrators profess it. Insurance companies advertise it. But when ordinary people go looking for reliable information about their own health, we hit

Why is information so hidden in healthcare?


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paherald.sk.ca/?p=214625

PA Daily Herald

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6 months ago

Health is the good fortune you make - Prince Albert Daily Herald When it comes to health, my father always told me that good luck is as important, if not more so, than good genes. Like genes, luck is allocated at life’s outset. Watching nightly news on wars, famine, and other disasters has always made me grateful to have been born in Canada. Yet, there’s something to

Health is the good fortune you make


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PA Daily Herald

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6 months ago

Fireworks Still Cause Tragedy We are not setting out to be killjoys. In fact, living it up with special celebrations is a good thing for most people. But every year, we witness foolish peopl

Fireworks Still Cause Tragedy


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PA Daily Herald

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6 months ago

A healthy debate starts with the facts Starting in 1975, my father, Ken Walker, under the penname W. Gifford-Jones MD, wrote a weekly column first appearing in the Globe and Mail, and subsequently syndicated in Canada and the U.S.

A healthy debate starts with the facts


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paherald.sk.ca/?p=213577

PA Daily Herald

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6 months ago

Use your head to check on quick health fixes There’s no harm in being gullible when the stakes are low or when you are having fun. Being open to the incredulous is part of being a curious person.

Use your head to check on quick health fixes


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PA Daily Herald

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7 months ago

Causes worth carrying on One should never use the word “crusade” lightly. But if you’ve ever watched someone battle against deeply entrenched systems, close-mindedness, or worst of all, indifference, then there’s no better word for what needs doing.

Causes worth carrying on


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PA Daily Herald

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7 months ago

Don’t skip screening tests that may save your life In these final dog days of summer, take a moment to reaffirm the simplest and most powerful tools for staying healthy: timely, evidence-based screening tests. Forget the full-body MRI and the blood test that promises to predict your future.

Don’t skip screening tests that may save your life


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PA Daily Herald

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7 months ago

Our self deceptions are being watched I’m writing this column with a pencil and paper, in a therapeutic affirmation that what results comes only from me and my thoughts. I’m making a point about authenticity.

Our self deceptions are being watched


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