Judy C. Googins, M.D.

07/07/2026

Some of the most important data ever to emerge regarding drinking alcohol is below.

07/07/2026

Medscape Medical News
Features

Alcohol’s Health Myth Is Over. How to Tell Patients
Sari Harrar
July 01, 2026
44
903
Jump to Key Points
For nearly 30 years, the media and many physicians promoted the belief — fueled by the French paradox and bias-ridden observational studies — that a drink or two a day could be good for many adults.

Now, better-designed research has uncorked a new truth: Even one drink a day can raise the risk for cancer, cardiovascular problems, liver disease, and early death. The government-commissioned Alcohol Intake and Health Study, published in June, found a level of drinking once considered potentially protective — a glass of red w**e with friends, a b**r on a summer night, a brunch-time cocktail — have no meaningful health benefits.

The study joins a growing body of research presenting physicians with a challenge: How to explain to patients, even light drinkers, that older studies were flawed, and the healthiest drink is none at all.

“The science is evolving in front of our eyes. That can be deeply unsettling, but it’s an opportunity to engage our patients in the conversation,” said oncologist Noelle LoConte, MD, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison, Wisconsin, and lead author of the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s most recent statement on alcohol and cancer.

Key Points
Newer data: even 1 drink/day ↑ cancer, CV, liver disease, and all-cause mortality risk.
No meaningful health benefit found for red w**e/light-moderate alcohol.
Prior J-shaped curve likely biased by sick-quitters + healthier drinker confounding.
Alcohol counseling is impactful; explicit clinician discussion ↑ awareness of cancer risk.
Patient discussions: nonjudgmental, collaborative, motivational interviewing; cancer risk = zero alcohol.
How does alcohol cessation affect blood pressure longitudinally?
Which confounders bias moderate alcohol observational studies?
What is alcohol's dose-response cancer risk threshold?
Hearing the message from a physician makes a difference. A 2021 study of 4549 US adults found just 44% remembered a clinician talking with them about alcohol’s harms in the past year, and only 35% thought there was a link between drinking and cancer risk. That rose to 52% when their doctor explicitly discussed it. Silence is risky: Cardiology patients who thought alcohol was heart healthy were 67% more likely to drink excessively, while adults who viewed alcohol as neutral or even beneficial for the heart were less than half as likely to recognize its cancer risks.

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“We know that physicians’ recommendations about alcohol are extremely impactful,” LoConte said. “We should be talking with patients about alcohol at least periodically.”

Sick Quitters and Unhealthy Abstainers: The Bias in Alcohol Studies

On a Sunday night in 1991, America watched as 60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer raised a glass of red w**e at a French bistro, suggesting it explained why France had lower heart disease rates despite a high-fat diet. Within a year, US red w**e sales rose 40%. Meanwhile, large epidemiologic studies — including the Framingham Study in 1983 and the Physician’s Health Study in 2000 — found a reduced risk for coronary artery disease with light-to-moderate drinking. By 2011, a major review of 84 studies concluded that the debate was essentially over.

But doubts were emerging, and for good reason: The widely reported “J-shaped curve” — graphs showing higher heart risks for abstainers, lower risks for moderate drinkers, and highest risks for heavy drinkers — turned out to be wrong.

Abstainer groups often included many “sick quitters” — former drinkers who’d stopped due to health problems — and never-drinkers who avoided alcohol because of life-long poor health, reported Canadian researchers in a 2016 analysis. Meanwhile, low-to-moderate drinkers typically enjoyed other major health advantages like higher incomes, healthier diets, more exercise, and less obesity, according to a 2023 follow-up analysis. Adjusting for these biases reduced alcohol’s survival protection to a statistically meaningless 3%.

Suggestions that light drinking benefits cholesterol or blood pressure have also lost out to newer data. In a 2025 Japanese study of 58,943 adults, light-to-moderate drinkers who quit saw blood pressure fall by their next annual check-up. Slight changes in cholesterol are not clinically significant, noted the American College of Cardiology.

“The science doesn’t lie — alcohol isn’t good for us,” said Douglas Spotts, MD, a family physician in Mifflinburg, Pennsylvania, and spokesperson for the American Academy of Family Physicians. “Physicians and scientists know enough now to confirm that the old adage about red w**e is nothing more than a myth. No amount of alcohol is safe — full stop.”

Talking to Patients About Alcohol

Recent trends may be on the physician’s side: alcohol use among US adults dropped to 54% in a July 2025 Gallup poll, the lowest in its 90-year-history. But alcohol remains deeply embedded socially. “Alcohol helps people socialize,” said LoConte. “It’s culturally normed. Adults enjoy it. These all make it hard for doctors to bring up with patients.”

Cardiologist Columbus Batiste, MD, agrees. “We get the head nod of ‘Ok, Doctor’ just to appease us, and you know the patient will do something completely different when they leave,” said Batiste, Chief of Cardiology at Kaiser Permanente in Moreno Valley, California.

Finding the right approach to discuss alcohol could be lifesaving, Batiste said. Acknowledging flawed older research starts with a positive, nonjudgmental attitude.

1. Shift the Focus From ‘Harm’ to ‘Health Promotion’

Flip the script from ‘alcohol is bad’ to a discussion of achieving health goals. “If the question is ‘How do I achieve health?’ then we’re talking about whether alcohol consumption is health promoting, which is a different question than ‘Will it harm you?’” Batiste said.

That moves alcohol into a healthy lifestyle context. “Alcohol is one component, along with a healthy diet, exercise, stress relief,” Batiste said. “When we look at a recipe for life, for health, sometimes those small ingredients matter a lot — a pinch of salt, a pinch of baking powder. It’s the same with alcohol and health.” If patients are relying on a few drinks to relax, feel comfortable in social situations, or numb physical or psychological pain, it’s time to talk about healthier options, he added.

2. Put the Patient in the Driver’s Seat

Batiste recommends framing the dynamic collaboratively. He tells patients: “You’re the CEO of your body. If you want it to flourish, here’s my advice as your professional advisor. You have the right to accept, veto, or ask for more supporting information.” The American Heart Association recommends this approach for supporting healthy lifestyle changes for patients — beginning with asking the patient for permission to give advice; providing clear, specific, and customized advice that increases patient knowledge about their health; and then asking the patient what actions they want to take.

3. Use Motivational Interviewing and Tracking

Rather than simply telling patients to drink less, experts said it can be more effective to start with a conversation about their habits and concerns. LoConte recommends asking whether patients are worried about their drinking and encouraging them to track when and how much they drink before discussing the results at a follow-up visit. While reducing alcohol is a positive step, she said it’s important to be clear about the evidence: “The number is zero for cancer.”

That doesn’t mean every conversation should sound the same. Batiste said recommendations should be tailored to a person’s overall health and drinking patterns. Someone who already has cardiovascular disease, heart failure, or an irregular heartbeat may face different risks than someone who drinks occasionally. But even for lighter drinkers, he said, patients should understand that “even light alcohol on a consistent basis could be harmful” over time.

4. Actively Debunk Common Patient Myths

Mistaken beliefs about alcohol include “red w**e is healthier”, “b**r is safer because it’s lower in alcohol by volume”, or “drinking is only a problem if you have an addiction” and “My friend’s aunt drank wh***ey every day and lived to 100.” “I see patients every week with these beliefs,” LoConte said.

5. Confront ‘Nutritional Whiplash’ Directly

Experts said it’s worth acknowledging that patients may feel confused by yet another shift in health advice. Explaining that scientific recommendations evolve as stronger evidence emerges can help put the change in context.

“As we saw with COVID, seeing science as iterative, the back-and-forth process can be deeply unsettling,” LoConte said. “It’s an opportunity to talk about research and health.” She also reminds patients that alcohol is different from many foods that seem to swing in and out of favor. “Alcohol isn’t like those,” she said. “It’s always been a Class 1 carcinogen-like ultraviolet light, to***co, and the human papillomavirus. And now, we’re solidifying the risk.”

05/23/2026

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

10/13/2025

From Medscape:
COMMENTARY
Alcohol: Bad for Heart, Brain, and Cognition?
JoAnn Manson, MD, DRPH
DISCLOSURES October 08, 2025

This is Dr JoAnn Manson, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. I’d like to talk with you about a recent report on alcohol consumption and the risk of dementia. It seems we’ve been misled about alcohol and health.

First, countless observational studies have suggested that alcohol protects the heart, the brain, and even leads to a longer lifespan. Then we were told the earlier studies may have produced spurious results because drinkers were compared to 1) nondrinkers who had often stopped drinking because of health problems, doctor’s advice, or being started on medications that interfere with alcohol consumption, and 2) moderate drinkers, who often tended to be of higher socioeconomic status and had healthier lifestyle practices.

When analyses were redone or new studies conducted, alcohol was linked to higher risks for hypertension, heart disease, stroke, atrial fibrillation, heart failure, and many other forms of cardiovascular disease — not to mention accidents, trauma, cirrhosis, several forms of cancer (eg, gastrointestinal and breast), and shortened lifespans.
Now, a new study that leveraged two large cohorts and a Mendelian randomization approach suggests that alcohol is also linked to an increased risk for dementia, with no safe level of drinking. The study, which was recently published in BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine, is fairly compelling. The investigators analyzed data from more than half a million participants in two large observational cohort studies: the UK Biobank and the US Million Veteran Program. The participants were aged 56-72 years at baseline and there were close to 15,000 incident cases of dementia.

In addition to seeing a higher risk for dementia with higher alcohol intake, a Mendelian randomization analysis that evaluated gene variants strongly related to alcohol consumption showed a monotonic increase in dementia risk with the genetic traits linked to alcohol intake. There was no evidence that moderate drinking protected against dementia.

The findings suggested that drinking any amount of alcohol seemed to increase dementia risk on a population level. The Mendelian randomization analysis suggested a causal role of alcohol consumption in increasing dementia risk with no evidence supporting protection, although the typical U-shaped curve was seen in the observational analyses. The researchers also found that people who developed dementia typically drink less in the years leading up to their diagnosis, suggesting reverse causation: Cognitive decline leading to reduced alcohol intake may underlie some of the protective associations seen with alcohol in observational studies.

These are important findings because in 2023, the World Health Organization issued a statement that no amount of alcohol is safe. Further, bench neuroscience research suggests that alcohol is directly toxic to neurons in the brain. So, it’s time to share this news with our patients and the public. We’ve been misled and mounting evidence challenges the notion that moderate alcohol consumption is protective of either the heart or brain. We should support our patients in reducing alcohol intake and certainly not encourage uptake of this habit for improving their health.

Credits:
Lead image: Medscape, LLC
Medscape Ob/Gyn © 2025 WebMD, LLC
Any views expressed above are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of WebMD or Medscape.
Cite this: Alcohol: Bad for Heart, Brain, and Cognition? - Medscape - October 08, 2025.

09/13/2025

Artificial sweeteners are terrible for women who are trying to conceive or who are pregnant . They INCREASE the risk of gestational diabetes. 

07/13/2025

The children of divorced parents are more likely to commit su***de.

New research suggests that the mental health effects of divorce may linger on well into adulthood, putting children of divorce at greater risk of su***de.

05/17/2025

The cries of sick children echoed down the hallway as Gilbert Handal walked into the measles ward for the first time. It was 1964 in Chile, and the young medical student had been assigned to Manuel Arriarán Hospital’s pediatric infectious disease unit.

Dozens of beds were crammed into the building, each holding a small, feverish body. Some children were struggling to breathe; others lay frighteningly still. Their parents waited helplessly, often outside the doors, while nurses and doctors moved solemnly through the ward. There was little they could do.

“That was just immediately before we had the measles vaccine,” Handal said. “I was just a student, and you're just studying medicine, trying to save humanity and trying to save the children.

“We tried to save those kids, but many of them died,” he added.

Now 82 years old and a professor of pediatrics and pediatric infectious diseases at Texas Tech Health in El Paso, Handal is sounding the alarm over low vaccination rates in West Texas, where a measles outbreak has infected 717 people and killed two school-aged children as of May 13. Though measles was declared eliminated in the U.S. at the turn of the century, rising vaccine hesitancy has fueled the largest surge of the disease in Texas in more than three decades.

“All the outbreaks we've had in this country have been associated with the lack of immunization,” he said. “People stopped immunizing their kids, and that was an error.”

Back in Chile, the second floor of the pediatric infectious disease unit was secluded, reserved for children infected with measles. Measles spreads primarily through the air, when infected people sneeze or cough.

The atmosphere was one of anxiety and exhaustion. As part of a team of six doctors, Handal spent up to 120 hours per week tending to rows of children battling high fevers, painful coughs and the signature red rash covering their bodies. According to Handal, the surge in measles cases was so overwhelming that the hospital's internal medicine unit was often repurposed to care for sick children.

He says most of the children were infants and toddlers.

“The children know they're sick, and that's all they know,” Handal said. “They don't know what's going on, they don't know anything, and the sicker they are, the more disconnected they get from you.”

Some children suffered from encephalitis, a dangerous swelling of the brain, while others had gone deaf and blind within days from unrelenting conjunctivitis, or pink eye. The emotional toll was enormous, especially for young trainees like Handal, who struggled with the psychological burden of facing death so regularly.

“When you lose a child, you remember that child the rest of your life,” Handal said. “I still remember the first child that died … He was about five months old and weighed the weight of a two-month-old baby.

“I mean, dear God, you try to really go on, and going on with life is difficult the way it is after you lose a child,” Handal added. “You keep mulling and mulling in your brain: what else could I have done? What didn't I do?”
Before the vaccine, about three to four million people in the U.S. were infected annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Around 48,000 required hospitalization and about 1,000 suffered encephalitis. Between 400 and 500 people died each year. But in Chile, where countless children were malnourished, that number was higher.

Handal said he lost count of how many children died during his time in the ward. But he never became numb to it — just learned to manage the grief.

“You don't get hardened, that's a bad word to use. You kind of cope with it better, I guess,” he said. “I mean, it's just – the pain is too much.”

Handal spent six relentless weeks in the measles ward before getting assigned to another unit in the Chilean hospital. Eventually, the measles vaccine reached Chile and everything changed.

“The acceptance of vaccination was massive,” Handal said. “The acceptance was dramatically making a huge change in the number of cases.”

That’s why the current outbreak in Texas is so troubling to Handal, likely one of the few remaining medical professionals who remembers a world before the vaccine.

Measles is one of the most contagious viruses on the planet. One case can quickly multiply into dozens if not enough people in a community are vaccinated. In West Texas, the epicenter of the current outbreak, immunization rates are strikingly lower than the rest of the state.

Handal fears the world is backsliding. He warns that falling vaccination rates could bring us back to a time when measles spread widely and claimed many lives.

“Measles is an unforgiving disease,” Handal said. “Every single outbreak that we've had has been associated with the poor immunization rates.”

For Handal, the memory of those lost children isn’t just a chapter in medical history.

It’s a warning.

“It strengthened my own ideas about diseases in general and what we can do about it, what we should do about – which is prevention,” Handal said. “The one message that's essential is please immunize, immunize, immunize … protect yourself and protect the community and the other children that cannot be immunized.

“I hope we will not see the measles that I saw,” he said.

'We tried to save those kids': Texas doctor watched children die of measles. Now it's back in Texas
By Lucio Vasquez | The Texas Newsroom
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Published May 14, 2025

03/10/2025

Confidential Physician Counseling Now Free Thanks to TMAIT
From Texas Medical Association;
Counseling Now Free Thanks to TMAIT
By Jessica Ridge
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573830-PLOMLU-483
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story includes discussion of su***de. If you or someone you know needs help, the national su***de and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988. There is also an online chat at 988lifeline.org.
In the past five years, the Texas Medical Association Insurance Trust has lost eight member physicians to su***de. In the wake of such loss, the trust has established a grant to make Anticipate Joy, a counseling service, free for Texas physicians.

The American Foundation for Su***de Prevention cites research that physicians are at outsized risk of su***de compared to the public. Those losses cut across geography and practice settings, leaving few discernible commonalities to address. For physicians facing that risk as well as for those who simply need a supportive outlet, TMAIT Executive Director Guy Patterson hopes the grant can improve access to appropriate care.

“There’s still a stigma associated with su***de and mental health issues, and we have got to remove that stigma, and that is why TMAIT is making this investment in [partnering with] Anticipate Joy,” Mr. Patterson said.

Anticipate Joy is now free for all Texas physicians – irrespective of TMA membership status. Through the service, a distinct entity TMA has contracted with to ensure privacy, physicians and their immediate family members can access unlimited individual counseling visits by phone, video, or text with a therapist of their choosing from Anticipate Joy’s platform.

The service differs from traditional employee assistance programs in two crucial ways: There is no limit on the number of sessions an individual user can receive, and the program is distinctly separate from TMA – or a physician’s employer. From TMA’s Wellness First webpage, physicians navigate to a different website (albeit with TMA’s logo), into which the association has no visibility, to initiate the HIPAA-compliant sessions.

Casey Harrison, associate vice president of physician education services, emphasizes TMA’s role as a liaison between physicians and Anticipate Joy, rather than an administrator of the program.

“If [physicians] were to click on a link from our Wellness First page, we don’t know if they’re going to do sessions once they get to Anticipate Joy’s page, because they’d have to sign up directly through them. It’s more just getting them the link, the resource, to get there.”

The Anticipate Joy website’s Choose a Plan step includes an obsolete reference to purchasing a session or a monthly subscription – this no longer applies and should be disregarded.

Physicians in several Texas counties may also find assistance in their county medical societies: Bexar, Dallas, Harris, McLennan, and Travis county societies all have independent programs for mental health assistance, ranging from courses to confidential talks with psychiatrists.

As Texas Medicine has previously reported: No single thing drives a physician to feel unwell. Once a physician feels unwell or is in crisis, stigma, concerns about confidentiality, a professional culture that encourages self-reliance, and simple overwhelm can coalesce into hesitation to seek help.

Misgivings about seeking help might additionally stem from conflation of TMA with the Texas Medical Board, a misconception Sue Mullen, the association’s manager of educational development services, wants to dispel.

“I think some physicians have confused TMA as part of the Texas Medical Board, and, of course, we are not.”

If you or a physician you know could benefit from counseling, begin the journey at TMA’s Wellness First webpage.

At the 988 Su***de & Crisis Lifeline, we understand that life’s challenges can sometimes be difficult. Whether you’re facing mental health struggles, emotional distress, alcohol or drug use concerns…

03/06/2025

Original Investigation
January 30, 2025
Ophthalmic Complications Associated With the Antidiabetic Drugs Semaglutide and Tirzepatide
Bradley J. Katz, MD, PhD1; Michael S. Lee, MD2; Norah S. Lincoff, MD3; et al Anne S. Abel, MD2; Somya Chowdhary, MD4; Brian D. Ellis, MD4; Ahmad Najafi, MD5; John Nguyen, MD4; Meagan D. Seay, DO1; Judith E. A. Warner, MD1,6
Author Affiliations
JAMA Ophthalmol. Published online January 30, 2025. doi:10.1001/jamaophthalmol.2024.6058
editorial comment icon Editorial
Comment
author interview icon Interviews
1x
Key Points
Question What are some of the ophthalmic complications that have been observed in patients using the drugs semaglutide or tirzepatide?

Findings In this case series of 9 patients, 7 patients are described with nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, 1 patient is described with papillitis. and 1 patient is described with paracentral acute middle maculopathy. All patients were using either semaglutide or tirzepatide.

Meaning Although a causal link between these drugs and observed complications cannot be established, these findings cannot rule out the possibility that rapid correction of hyperglycemia may be associated with the results reported.

Abstract
Importance Nearly 2% of the US population received a prescription for semaglutide in 2023. There has been a recent concern that this drug and other similar medications may be associated with ophthalmic complications.

Objective To report ophthalmic complications associated with the use of semaglutide or tirzepatide.

Design, Setting, and Participants This was a retrospective case series. All patients were initially seen in a community setting. Patients experiencing an ophthalmic complication in association with the use of semaglutide or tirzepatide were included in this analysis.

Exposures Patients described were using either semaglutide or tirzepatide.

Main Outcomes and Measures Visual acuity and visual field defects.

Results A total of 9 patients (mean [SD] age, 57.4 [11.6] years; age range, 37-77 years; 5 female [56%]; 4 male [44%]) were included in this study. Seven patients with nonarteritic ischemic anterior optic neuropathy, 1 patient with bilateral papillitis, and 1 patient with paracentral acute middle maculopathy were reported. Atypical features included sequential ischemic optic neuropathy, bilateral disc swelling at presentation, and progressive vision loss.

Conclusions and Relevance In this case series study, it was not possible to determine if there is a causal link between these drugs and the ophthalmic complications reported. In some cases, it is hypothesized that rapid correction of hyperglycemia induced by these drugs, rather than a toxic effect of the drugs, could be associated with the ophthalmic complications reported.

Invited Commentary
GLP-1 RAs and Nonarteritic Anterior Ischemic Optic Neuropathy
JAMA Ophthalmology