The world's largest randomized controlled trial of the use of acupuncture in emergency departments has found the treatment is a safe and effective alternative to pain-relieving drugs for some patients.

Led by RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, the study found acupuncture was as effective as pain medicine in providing long-term relief for patients who came to emergency in considerable pain.

But the trial, conducted in the emergency departments of four Melbourne hospitals, showed pain management remains a critical issue, with neither treatment providing adequate immediate relief.

Lead investigator Professor Marc Cohen, from RMIT's School of Health and Biomedical Sciences, said pain was the most common reason people came to emergency, but was often inadequately managed.

"While acupuncture is widely used by practitioners in community settings for treating pain, it is rarely used in hospital emergency departments," Cohen said.

"Emergency nurses and doctors need a variety of pain-relieving options when treating patients, given the concerns around opioids such as morphine, which carry the risk of addiction when used long-term.

"Our study has shown acupuncture is a viable alternative, and would be especially beneficial for patients who are unable to take standard pain-relieving drugs because of other medical conditions.

"But it's clear we need more research overall to develop better medical approaches to pain management, as the study also showed patients initially remained in some pain, no matter what treatment they received."

Songwriters, poets and novelists have long mused over whether time truly heals everything.

Charles Dickens toyed over whether the bitter Miss Haversham would ever recover from being jilted at the altar, and for many historians, Queen Victoria's black dress came to symbolise her irreparable suffering over Prince Albert's death.

But a new study has apparently put their agonising to bed and concluded that not even the clock can always mend a broken heart.

A team of medical researchers from the University of Aberdeen have said that so-called "broken heart syndrome" can leave physical scars that never recover.

British Heart Foundation-funded study followed 52 patients over four months, aged between 28 and 87, who suffered with what is officially known as takotsubo syndrome.

The environmental advocacy group Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) on June 15 released a study about dietary lead exposure, with a focus on food intended for babies and young children.

Using a Federal Drug Administration (FDA) database of food samples, EDF reported some pretty worrying numbers, most remarkably in fruit juice samples intended for children. For example, 89 percent of the baby food grape juice samples had detectable levels of lead in them.

As researchers who served as independent reviewers on the EDF report, we think it raises important concerns about the safety of our food supply. Since EDF primarily focused on exposure (whether lead was detectable or not), we were interested to see if we could get a better sense of the magnitude of risk. Specifically, we examined potential IQ loss and the percentage of samples with high lead concentrations.

Call it the case of the mysterious mouse tumor.

It's been 34 years since Monsanto Co. presented U.S. regulators with a seemingly routine study analyzing the effects the company's best-selling herbicide might have on rodents. Now, that study is once again under the microscope, emerging as a potentially pivotal piece of evidence in litigation brought by hundreds of people who claim Monsanto's weed killer gave them cancer.

This week, tissue slides from long-dead mice in that long-ago research study are being scrutinized by fresh eyes as an expert pathologist employed by lawyers for cancer victims looks for evidence the lawyers hope will help prove a cover-up of the dangers of the weed killer called glyphosate.

Glyphosate, which is the active ingredient in Monsanto's branded Roundup products, is the most widely used herbicide in the world, and is applied broadly in the production of more than 100 food crops, including wheat, corn and soy, as well as on residential lawns, golf courses and school yards.

The fact that some people — 16.4 million, to be precise — believe chocolate milk comes directly from a cow's teat is a problem.

Because consumers have the option of picking and choosing from a plethora of goods when they visit the supermarket, few actually consider where their food comes from. This is a conundrum, one that is leading to ignorance pertaining to food cultivation and its use. And, a new survey commissioned by the Innovation Center for US Dairy confirms this.

Reportedly, an astonishing 7 percent of American citizens believe chocolate milk comes directly from a brown cow. In fact, the question "Does chocolate milk come from brown cows?" is the most frequently asked question on the Center's website. Fortunately, a polite response is offered: "Actually, chocolate milk - or any flavored milk for that matter - is white cow's milk with added flavoring and sweeteners," reads the website.

The Federal District Court of Missouri deemed that bleached white flour was unfit for human consumption, in 1910.

Shockingly, the 1st chief of the Food and Drug Administration at the time, H. W. Wiley, said that the law was "halted through the political influence of the flour millers" and "no notice of violations has since been made by the FDA."

Mr. Wiley's book "The History of a Crime Against the Pure Food Law" goes over the case:

These days flour is made from wheat that's exposed to harmful pesticides, insecticides, and fungicides from the minute they are seeded and stored away. Since this time, around 60 various chemicals have been approved by the FDA to bleach white flour.

5 Secrets About White Flour That will Shock You

1. Bleached Flour contains nearly NO nutrients.

White Flour manufacturer's start by removing bran from wheat seed, its 6 outer layers, and the germ that has 76% of minerals and vitamins. 97 percent of the dietary fiber is also gone. This process strips all iron, magnesium, B vitamins, vitamin E, 70% phosphorus and 50% of calcium.

We are living in a world where pesticides are common and surround us. Unfortunately, the exposure to these dangerous substances cannot be avoided completely, as we consume foods sprayed with them, use products which contain them, and the soil and air are rich in them.

A recent study has also found that pesticides are also found in some of the most popular tea brands in the world, such as Lipton, Tetley, and Twinings.

Mountain Dew, the carbonated fluorescent-green soda that Willy the Hillbilly declared "will tickle your innards" in a 1966 commercial, has long been a staple of Appalachia. It was officially developed in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the mid-1900s, but it has ties to the wheat and rye distilled by Irish immigrants who settled in the region as coal miners during the previous century. Today, coal has left Appalachia, as have a host of other industries that brought economic opportunity. Mountain Dew, however, remains culturally significant. Sarah Baird, a writer who grew up in Eastern Kentucky, recently wrote about the importance of the drink to her sense of identity, saying, "It's not just a beverage—it's a portable sense of home."

In a region long undergoing a cultural and economic crisis, Appalachia's thirst for Mountain Dew is perhaps the lesser of many evils. Opioid addiction, smoking, chewing tobacco, lack of access to municipal water systems, and the necessary preoccupation with getting food on the table over worrying about nutritional value are also having an enormous effect on people's teeth. The soda is ruining teeth, in an epidemic known as "Mountain Dew-mouth." The acid causes erosion and the sugar abets decay.

Burnout is becoming a more common problem in the United States and around the world. How can you avoid it or recover from it if you've already hit the proverbial wall? Dr. Joseph Maroon, a professor of neurosurgery at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, has written a book that addresses these very questions.

"Square One: A Simple Guide to a Balanced Life" grew out of his own struggles with burnout, setbacks and depression after he'd become a world-class neurosurgeon before the age of 40.

"I've had rather impressive success [and] cataclysmic failure personally," Maroon says. "I was intent on becoming the very best that I could in terms of my profession, neurosurgery. I worked extremely diligently. It became an all-encompassing pursuit for me in my life ... with success, societal approval, writing papers, going to national meetings ...

Soon after becoming chief of neurosurgery at a major university hospital, I [cracked]. My father died, my wife and children left me, I had to quit my profession as a neurosurgeon due to the overwhelming stress ... all within one week ... The next week, I [was] helping my mother run a rather dilapidated truck stop left to her by my father in Wheeling, West Virginia, living on a farm.

One day I was doing brain surgery and [the next] literally filling up 18-wheelers and flipping hamburgers in a rundown truck stop. It was a great fall. It was kind of like an Icarian metaphor of flying too near the sun. I got scorched and I plummeted into the sea — a sea of depression."

If you've ever been in a place or circumstance where hot running water wasn't available for some reason, perhaps you had a vague sense when washing your hands in the only water available — cold — that they weren't really getting clean. That's probably because most of us learned in kindergarten that washing with hot, soapy water is imperative to kill germs. The belief is so ingrained that it's been written in government regulations (at least in the U.S.) for years.

Even using soap with cold water may seem as if using hot water would do a better job, but is there any actual scientific evidence this is true? Here's your answer: New research shows that if the water you're using to wash your hands is lukewarm or even cold, it does just as well as hot to remove bacteria. It's the length of time and the method that make all the difference.

The study, conducted at Rutgers University and published in the Journal of Food Protection,¹ involved 21 participants and ended with an interesting conclusion: Whether they washed their hands in 60-, 79- or 100-degree (Fahrenheit) water, there was no difference in the "clean" they attained when they lathered their hands and washed them for 10 seconds.

But here's the kicker: Every one of those individuals had high levels of E. coli bacteria "applied" to their hands. Although the scientists in charge used a "nonpathogenic" strain of the bacteria, each subject was asked to wash their hands using several different water temperatures and for varying lengths of washing time.

They used cold, warm or hot water, between half a milliliter and 2 milliliters (ml) of soap and washed for anywhere from five to 40 seconds. They repeated the experiment 20 times over a six-month period. Time added: