Health, Science, Environment

A spoonful of sugar may help the medicine go down. But what if the medicine itself were sweet?

People have taken honey through the centuries as a treatment for a variety of ailments – including as an allergy suppressant. But can something that tastes that good really be a medicine?

The state has seen a huge drop in public funding for public space. Over the past year, a quarter of state parks have closed indefinitely, because the state doesn’t have the money to maintain them. In their place are more and more spaces that are open to public use, but privately owned. This is actually nothing new. People find themselves in public-private spaces all the time: cafes; shopping malls; or even some parks like Zuccotti in Manhattan, the starting place of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Researchers have been starting to study how the recession will affect our health in the coming years. Dr. Sanjay Basu is a researcher at UCSF. KALW's Ben Trefny visited him at San Francisco General Hospital and asked him how he has seen impoverished conditions conspire to bring down one’s physical and emotional health.