It's not congestion and it's not your imagination: nearly everyone breathes mostly through one nostril at a time. Here's the automatic cycle behind it, and how to tell it apart from a real blockage.

Compounding pharmacies aren't FDA-approved, because that approval doesn't exist for them. Here's the regulatory split behind the copycat-Ozempic crackdown, and why claiming otherwise just got 25 telehealth firms in trouble.

Four in ten drug policies require patients to fail on a cheaper medication first. A wave of 2026 state laws is starting to cap how long that can take.

It isn't bad luck. HSV-1 goes dormant in a single nerve branch and always follows that same route back to the skin.

It's not just distraction. Cortisol bottoms out at night while histamine activity rises, and mosquitoes themselves are built to hunt hardest at dusk and dawn.

The jolt from bumping your elbow doesn't come from bone at all. It's the ulnar nerve, exposed at the one point in the arm where it runs nearly bare.

A federal tracking system logs every pseudoephedrine sale in real time. Here's why Sudafed sits behind the counter, what the purchase limits actually are, and when they start to matter.

The idea that Zyrtec or Claritin "stops working" after enough years is mostly folklore. The medicine that genuinely does lose its effect is the decongestant spray sitting next to it.

The FDA's April 2026 proposal would end large-scale compounding of semaglutide and tirzepatide. Individual-patient compounding isn't affected, but the supply picture is about to shrink.

A scar's color tells you exactly what stage of healing it is in. Here's why the final stage is almost always pale, not pink.

Two people can sit in the same back seat and have completely different afternoons. The difference traces back to how tightly the brain's balance system is wired, and to genes researchers are only now starting to map.

Roughly 1 in 5 people get bitten far more than everyone around them. Blood type, sweat chemistry, exercise and genetics all contribute, and the beer connection remains an unsolved mystery.

Doubling your SPF doesn't double your protection. The real gap between SPF 30 and SPF 50 is smaller than the label suggests, and how much you apply matters more than either number.

About 32 million insured US adults reached their dental plan's annual maximum in 2024, and nearly half stopped care as a result. The cap behind it hasn't meaningfully moved in decades.

Summer-pattern seasonal affective disorder is the lesser-known, agitated opposite of winter depression -- real enough for NIMH's diagnostic criteria, but still short on answers about its cause.

Drug ads that name a condition and a brand are banned nearly everywhere in the world. Here's how the US and New Zealand ended up as the two exceptions.

Seventy percent of people are biologically wired for a sleep schedule the workweek doesn't respect. Social jet lag is what happens when body clock and calendar keep disagreeing.

A growing number of states let doctors with strong approval records skip prior authorization entirely. Here's how 'gold carding' works, and its limits.

A bottle of melatonin in an American drugstore can pack five to ten milligrams; the same supplement in France is capped under two. The regulatory gap has real consequences for how families use -- and mis-store -- a hormone most people assume is harmless.

A year after roughly 60 insurers pledged to streamline prior authorization, a new AMA physician survey shows the process is still slow, still denied often, and still eroding trust.