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Man gets diagnosed with PSC, which then morphed into cancer

DEAR DR. ROACH: No parent should ever outlive their children. A couple of years ago, my son, who is now approaching 54 years young, was diagnosed with what I am told is an extremely rare illness called primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC). Since he required special bile duct tubes to be installed and repeatedly changed out, he had been waiting for a proper liver transplant. When this was finally about to happen, the disease apparently morphed into abdominal cancer, thus rendering the (long-awaited) liver transplant no longer viable. I had never heard of this illness before, but ...

Little kids, big government

Child care got expensive — more than $13,000 per child, per year. So many people want government to pay for it. My state just agreed. New York will fund free child care. Yay! But wait ... what government does isn’t free. Taxpayers pay. And taxpayers pay more because “government rules have unintended consequences,” says Carrie Lukas of the Independent Women’s Forum. Washington, D.C. day care teachers must have a degree in Early Childhood Education. That can take two years and cost $22,000. “Of course you’re going to have to pay a lot more,” says Lukas in my ...

What the end of Viktor Orban means for the New Right

Viktor Orban, the proudly “illiberal” prime minister of Hungary, beloved by various New Right nationalists and MAGA American intellectuals, was crushed at the polls this weekend. Over the last decade or so, Hungary became for the New Right what Sweden or Cuba were to the Old Left. For generations, various American leftists loved to cite the Cuban model as better than ours when it came to healthcare, or education. Some would even make wild claims about freedom under Fidel Castro’s dictatorship. Susan Sontag famously proclaimed in 1969 that no Cuban writer “has been or is in jail ...

Dear Annie: Resetting a pandemic friendship

Dear Annie: My neighbor and I became friendly during the pandemic. We’d pick up things for each other at the grocery store, help water each other’s plants, chat on our porches in the evening. Somewhere along the way, she decided we were much closer than I did. Now she’ll drop by unannounced and even text things like, “I miss you, haven’t seen you today!” if I don’t respond quickly. This type of thing was fine when we were all locked at home, but we’re not living in a pandemic anymore. I’m too busy to entertain her all the time. She’s a really nice woman, but ...

Skin scratch testing reveals a false-positive peanut allergy

DEAR DR. ROACH: I recently underwent skin scratch testing for food allergies. I was shocked that among the positive findings was peanuts. I have eaten peanuts all of my life (I’m 55) and have never had any type of reaction to peanuts. I was given an EpiPen and was told to avoid peanuts. The same skin testing results were confirmed by a second allergist. I’m afraid that avoiding peanuts will sensitize me to them when I feel that I’m currently desensitized. I do have chronic inflammation and rheumatoid arthritis, so I don’t want to ingest something that may cause an ...

Pope vs. president is a fight everyone loses

President Trump and Pope Leo are in a war of words right now — when they should be allies, not enemies. Both want peace, but the president intends to get it by winning a war against Iran, while the pope thinks the war isn’t worth fighting. “I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon,” Trump said Sunday on his Truth social-media network, in a post blasting the pontiff as “weak on crime and terrible for foreign policy.” With midterm elections just seven months away, Catholic voters suddenly find themselves in the crossfire between the ...