Blooming Wellness
Dr. Eek's Health & Wellness Blog
In 1902, U.S. government chemist Harvey Wiley began recruiting healthy young men for an unusual experiment. View this post on Instagram A post shared by EeKs (@doctoreeks) Their assignment? Eat food containing measured amounts of chemical preservatives and see what happened. The substances tested included borax, benzoates and formaldehyde, among others. The men ate carefully …
Anyone ever participate in a Swat the Fly campaign? ;) @dr..eeks In this episode of Public Health is Weird… Public health has tried a lot of things over the years. At one point, some communities literally paid kids to kill flies. I’m less interested in the campaign… and more interested in the person whose job …
Imagine walking into a train station. You’re thirsty. You spot a drinking fountain. Except…it’s not really a drinking fountain. It’s a single metal cup hanging from a chain. You take a drink. Hang it back up. The next stranger does the same thing. One cup. For everyone. It sounds like the setup for a horror …
Public health is weird. Sometimes really weird. And sometimes it makes you stop reading, stare into the distance for a few seconds, and say: “Wait…they did WHAT?” Welcome to Prohibition. When the United States banned alcohol in 1920, people didn’t suddenly decide they preferred celery juice. Instead, many turned to bootleg liquor. Some of that …
Did Victorian wallpaper really make people sick? Believe it or not, yes. @dr..eeks In this segment of Public Health is Weird: During the 1800s, some Victorian wallpapers were made with arsenic-based pigments, especially the vibrant greens. Over time, reports of unexplained illnesses—and some deaths—led investigators to suspect the wallpaper itself. Scientists now believe arsenic exposure …
@dr..eeks By now, you’ve probably heard of the Cyclospora outbreak investigation? Everyone keeps referring to "explosive diarrhea," so naturally my brain goes to: Is there an operational definition for explosive diarrhea? Like… a splash radius? Exit velocity? A peer-reviewed threshold? ;) As far as I could tell, there isn't a standardized definition. But everyone still …
In late October 1999, leaders at the CDC published an article in JAMA warning that obesity had become a national crisis. The CDC Director at the time, Jeffrey Koplan, wrote this in a press release: “Overweight and physical inactivity account for more than 300,000 premature deaths each year in the U.S., second only to tobacco-related deaths. …
One of the strangest chapters in medical history involves a treatment that sounds completely backwards today. People once smoked cigarettes to relieve asthma symptoms. View this post on Instagram A post shared by EeKs (@doctoreeks) Before modern rescue inhalers, “asthma cigarettes” were sold in pharmacies and prescribed by physicians. They weren’t ordinary tobacco cigarettes. Instead, …
America has always had a love affair with celebrating freedom through controlled explosions. Today, we mostly worry about fireworks causing burns or sending someone to the emergency room. Some people will lose fingers, cuz they just don’t listen or they’re too drunk to listen. But around the turn of the 20th century, doctors feared something …
In the late 1800s, cocaine wasn’t just legal, it was found in a variety of medicines. One of the more surprising examples was cocaine toothache drops, which were sold over the counter to relieve dental pain. Watch my reel here: View this post on Instagram A post shared by EeKs (@doctoreeks) The reason they worked …
And then there was…the Pop Rocks Myth. In the late 1970s, parents across America became convinced that mixing Pop Rocks candy and soda could make a child’s stomach explode. The rumor became so widespread that it even claimed “Little Mikey,” the boy from the popular Life cereal commercials, had died after eating Pop Rocks and …
Public Health is Weird… View this post on Instagram A post shared by EeKs (@doctoreeks) If you think debates over masks are something new, history has other ideas. A long time ago, before COVID, there was a lot of fighting over the 1918 flu pandemics masks. During the 1918 pandemic, several U.S. cities required people …
