Media Coverage

“I think it’s a phenomenal idea,” said Dr. Sarah Friedewald, an oncologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. “Being competitive just helps your endorphins and gets your body ready to fight the next fight,” Friedewald said.

Being open after errors may also help avoid litigation, noted Dr. Gary Noskin , senior vice president and chief medical officer of Northwestern Memorial Hospital and a researcher at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. “Traditionally, hospitals follow a ‘deny and defend’ strategy providing a paucity of information to patients,” Noskin, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by email.

Those are good but hard-to-answer questions, says Dr. Shuai Xu, a dermatologist affiliated with Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. You see, moisturizers and their advertised claims, like all other cosmetic and personal care products, are at best loosely regulated, dependent almost entirely on the integrity of manufacturers to market a safe, effective product and on consumers to holler loudly when a product is neither. Furthermore, as Dr. Jonathan I. Silverberg, who directs Northwestern’s Contact Dermatitis Clinic and Eczema Center, explained, “Much of the labeling of products as hypoallergenic is nonsense. If you use a product long or often enough, you can become vulnerable to an allergic reaction. It’s not that the product is mislabeled – it’s that you can become allergic to almost anything, especially if you have a predisposition.”

To a lesser extent, it’s also all those people who just can’t turn off the iPad at night and have to drag themselves out of bed in the morning. Fred Turek , is a circadian scientist at Northwestern University. FRED TUREK: These people are totally out of synchrony. When their body clock is telling them to go to sleep, they have to be awake. And then when they try to go to sleep, their body clock is saying, hey, time to get up.

In recent years, some plastic surgeons have started posting videos of their surgeries on social media in hopes of informing and attracting new patients. But in some cases, their antics seem designed more for entertainment than education, raising ethical questions, according to a new paper from Northwestern Medicine researchers published in the journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.

In recent years, some plastic surgeons have started posting videos of their surgeries on social media in hopes of informing and attracting new patients. But in some cases, their antics seem designed more for entertainment than education, raising ethical questions, according to a new paper from Northwestern Medicine researchers published in the journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.

A. Vania Apkarian, a pain researcher at Northwestern University who also uses brain imaging techniques, but was not involved in the research, says that the study advances our understanding about how our biases influence our healthcare. “We have assumed for many years that the brain would control pain perception at many different levels and that expectations would change those things,” he tells Newsweek. This study is the first to show the entire circuitry linking expectations and perceptions, Apkarian explained.

“Plastic surgery is uniquely drawn to social media because we tend to do more marketing and we are a visual specialty,” said Dr. Clark Schierle , senior author of the guidelines and a plastic surgeon at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. “In general, there should be an effort to avoid distractions from the actual surgery itself and sharing any content that makes the patient identifiable without specific consent,” Schierle said by email.

“In those cases, there are more studies that are just done on females, because they’re female-prevalent diseases,” says Teresa Woodruff , director of the Women’s Health Research Institute at Northwestern University in Chicago. “But if you include males in the biology [studies], you often learn more about why there is this impact. That’s why we’re advocating for inclusion at the basic science level.” Transparent, inclusive studies that publish the gender breakdown of participants and provide results stratified by sex would make new scientific discoveries more likely, she says.

“Every single day, I get questions about what moisturizer should I use, what sunscreen should I use,” says Dr. Steve Xu, a dermatologist at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “I found myself really struggling to provide evidence-based recommendations for my patients,” he says. So he decided to take on the challenge of figuring out “what’s actually in this stuff.” Xu and some of his colleagues at Northwestern, examined the ingredients of the top 100 best-selling moisturizers sold by Amazon, Target and Walmart. And what he found was pretty surprising, he says. Nearly half — 45 percent — of the products in the study that claimed to be “fragrance-free” actually contained some form of fragrance. And the vast majority — 83 percent — of products labeled “hypoallergenic” contained a potentially allergenic chemical.