By Dr. Hanna ShanarEmergency medicine physician
Viral health claims, checked against the evidence by a practising physician. One claim at a time, every source shown.
Latest
The claim: “Parents push for an autism diagnosis because a labelled child gets free childcare paid for by insurance or Medicaid, and that's a big reason diagnoses have soared.”
Medicaid paid $1.9 billion for autism therapy in 2021 and $10.1 billion in 2025. Some centers run full weekdays for toddlers. Here's what the money shows, and what it doesn't.
Read the evidence · 8 min“Doctors are rich.”
The median doctor earns $276,000 a year. So why do so many hit their first million later than people who never went to medical school? Here's the data, and the five paths that match or beat medicine.
“You don't need blood pressure medication. Just change your lifestyle.”
Half of American adults have high blood pressure. Here's what it is, why it happens, why “treat the root cause, not the symptom” falls apart for blood pressure, what the 2025 guideline tells doctors to do, how many years a pill can buy, who dies of it first, and why telling everyone to skip the pills and fix it with lifestyle is advice only some people can afford to take.
“The rise in autism diagnoses proves there's an epidemic. Something new is causing it.”
In 2000, 1 in 150 American 8-year-olds had an autism diagnosis. By 2022 it was 1 in 31. Here's what changed: the children, or the way we count them.
Send it over. The most-asked claims get a full write-up.