Category: Science and Health

These were the words of the loving parents of a bright seven-year-old boy who is my patient. Their story, which they shared with me, appears in my book Who is Afraid of the Darkness Monster? Eleven parents, four teenagers and I disclosed the “behind the scenes” of coping with childhood mental illness for years. It […]

“Fine-tuning one’s inner monologue” on body image can minimize the distress caused by negative body perceptions in young women between the ages of 20-30 who often develop eating disorders, according to Prof. Guy Doron of Reichman University in Herzliya and colleagues at the University of Padua in Italy. The adjustment of this “inner monologue” is […]

Reduced access to infertility treatments early in the pandemic may have contributed to a drop in twin births, data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest. The number of twin births fell 7% between 2019 and 2020 – from 120,291 to 112,437 – compared to an average 2%-per-year decline from 2014 to […]

You are probably wondering why we are writing about the holes in the socks of soccer players in the health section, but believe it or not, there is a health reason behind this. The holes in the socks became an unexpected but regular sight during the World Cup 2022 in Qatar. The reason for this […]

One of the first courses I took in graduate school was called “Theory and Methods in the Study of Religion.” A course common across religious studies programs, the version I took had us reading a lot of 19th and early 20th century texts which have become “classics” in the field. One of those texts was […]

Sourasky surgeons performed the transplant of a replacement liver that had been disqualified from being donated to others for the first time this week. Hagai Vyacheslav, a 45-year-old divorced father of two small children, thought he was doomed. He started suffering from severe stomach pains two years ago, and because of that, he reached the […]

Popular anti-parasitic drug ivermectin, once also falsely touted as a possible COVID-19 cure, may actually have another secret and game-changing use: Killing bed bugs, according to a recent study. While ivermectin is not effective in curing the deadly coronavirus that has spread throughout the world since 2020, it may be able to help tackle another […]

More than one biblical story pivots on the occurrence of a significant dream, or a vision of the night. The Talmud takes dreams seriously, although it understands their limitations: “even a dream that will be fulfilled contains some nonsense.” (Berakhot 55a) Maimonides writes that the Patriarchs experience prophesy only in dreams. This statement leads to an objection […]

Bronchiolitis is a common chest infection that affects babies and children under the age of two years, especially in the autumn and winter and causes the accumulation of mucus and phlegm in the small airways (bronchioles), resulting in partial blockage. It is the leading cause in the Western world for hospitalizations of babies before their […]

A significant new function of the mammalian sperm protein IZUMO1 that may ultimately lead to more targeted diagnoses and treatment of human fertility problems and promote the development of more sophisticated forms of contraception has been discovered by researchers at Haifa’s Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and two Japanese universities.  They found that the protein IZUMO1, […]