(Courtesy of Doioffend.net) Want to shape up for spring and summer? From eating like a caveman to pecking like a bird, there are so many conflicting diet plans, it can feel impossible to know what might work for you. But, to make things easier, we know of a few former fads that definitely won’t help you shed pounds. Take the “fat spot reducer,” a vibrating massage machine meant to burn fat — with no effort — that was popular in...

A 19-year-old woman who lost her ear to a dog attack got it back with the help of a few leeches. A pit bull mauling left the 19-year-old with a small laceration on her arm and her left ear entirely torn off, with a stud earring still in place. While plastic surgeons are trained to reattach severed organs, these reattachments are simplest when the cut is clean and sharp — as from a kitchen knife, Dr. Stephen Sullivan, a plastic...

After 17 life-threatening anaphylactic shocks — always near the soccer field, where she plays for the University of Toledo — Caitlin McComish, 20, was diagnosed with cholinergic urticarial, an allergy triggered by sweat. Cholinergic urticarial is not extremely common, but it’s not rare either. It affects about 20 percent of the population at some point in a lifetime, according to the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. But McComish’s condition is exceptionally severe. (MORE: TheWorst Cities forSpring Allergies) “Most...

Germs are everywhere — even though the winter cold and flu season is over. One nasty example, bolstered by new research: The microbes living on your paper money. Researchers at New York University identified 3,000 types of bacteria on 80 $1 bills, collected from a New York City bank. And they were only able to identify 20 percent of the microbes living on the bills — yuck! The most common bacteria was the one that causes acne, researchers said, according...

If you’re looking to shape up for summer and learn to love your warm-weather clothes, here’s some inspiration. At 16, Caty Pasternak, now 22, weighed 230 pounds. She ate what she wanted and didn’t exercise without giving her body — or her health — a second thought. Then the junior prom rolled around, and she saw her friends getting asked to the dance. “No one wants to take the fat girl,” she told weather.com. That sparked a change: She started...

Antibiotic overuse has got to stop, cautioned the World Health Organization inAntimicrobial Resistance: Global Report on Surveillance 2014, the first comprehensive WHO report on the subject. Antibiotic resistance occurs when bacteria “outsmart” the drugs designed to kill them. It’s an increasingly severe issue, “a problem so serious that it threatens the achievements of modern medicine. A post-antibiotic era — in which common infections and minor injuries can kill — far from being an apocalyptic fantasy, is instead a very real...

Spring pollen hurts more than just people with allergies; it also harms asthma patients. Besides seasonal allergies, smoking and air pollution also play a role in whether someone develops asthma and how severe that asthma is likely to be. (Allergies are a huge factor, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America; 60 percent of people with asthma also have allergies.) Health care access and poverty are other indicators of how prevalent asthma is likely to be in a...

We might have iPhones, but ancient humans had a lot on us when it comes to fitness, according to a paper recently presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Calgary, Alberta. In it, Cambridge University researcher Alison Macintosh said that the fitness of pre-farming humans vastly outstripped even today’s most-elite athletes. In Central Europe, the human fitness decline began around the emergence of agriculture, approximately 5,300 B.C. At that time, early farmers had bone...

Hurricanes and Stillbirth (NASA/Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team) Preparing your family and home for a hurricane is the beginning of a potentially devastating experience. But surviving the storm itself hardly ensures a smooth recovery — the aftermath can be just as hazardous. “There are numerous environmental health hazards after a disaster,” Paula Rupert, RN, MSN, FNP-BC, nurse practitioner at Houston Methodist Department of Surgery in Texas, told weather.com. Home clean up and restoration might top the list of...

Sometimes, just going outside — particularly on hot, humid days — can be bad for your health, thanks to air pollution. In the United States, though, overall air pollution isn’t as bad as it is in many other countries, according to data released by the World Health Organization. (MORE: The WORST Cities for Air Pollution) The organization’s database covers 1,600 cities across 91 countries, and shows that only 12 percent of people live in cities that meet WHO air quality...

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is determining whether or not a patient in Florida has been infected with the deadly MERS coronavirus, according to NBC Chicago. The patient would be the second confirmed case in the United States, and the second in two weeks. Cases of the virus have surged in the past month and continue to spread across Saudi Arabia, according to a report from the Saudi Arabia Ministry of Health. Health officials have warned residents...

All-natural foods from the earth have long been thought to be the best way to fuel your body. But new research pokes holes into the presumed benefit of two plant-based favorites: red wine and dark chocolate. Researchers from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health wrote in JAMA Internal Medicine that resveratrol — an antioxidant found in red wine, grapes and dark chocolate — is not associated with lower rates of inflammation, cancer, heart disease...