Subscribe to Excerpts
Subscribe by Email
Opiate painkiller overdoses are at epidemic levels in the United States, but the public health and public safety systems have not adapted sufficiently in response. A simple, inexpensive and life saving reform would be to have police, firefighters and other first responders carry naloxone (aka Narcan) as standard equipment. Naloxone is a medication that reverses [...]
Archive for the ‘Health and Medicine’ Category
February 1st, 2012
Category: Britain, Health and Medicine
Paul Costello relates the disturbing tale of how Margaret Thatcher made a living after being PM: She entered into a lucrative deal with Big Tobacco.
January 28th, 2012
I don’t believe anything Gingrich says, but he seems to have a pretty damning indictment of Romney’s involvement in massive Medicare fraud.
January 27th, 2012
Category: Health and Medicine, Technology and Society
I gave Psychiatry Grand Rounds yesterday at the University of Arkansas Medical School in Little Rock. During the tour of the beautiful, modern and environmentally-state of the art Psychiatric Research Institute, I was impressed by something called a “suicide resistant door”. One of the challenges of inpatient psychiatric services is that while you want to [...]
January 23rd, 2012
Dr. Walter Ling, one of the world’s most respected addiction treatment researchers, has completed the first long-term placebo-controlled trial of PROMETA. This alleged miracle cure for methamphetamine addiction proved completely ineffective. I have a short commentary in the journal Addiction (pdf here) describing the rise and fall of this heavily-promoted treatment protocol. 60 Minutes did [...]
January 11th, 2012
Category: Health and Medicine
ProPublica has discovered that the American Pain Foundation, ostensibly the independent voice of pain patients, is in fact largely a subsidiary of painkiller manufacturers. Predictably, APF says they are not influenced by having more than 90% of their budget coming from the pharmaceutical industry. One wonders then why they hid the relationship, given that it [...]
January 6th, 2012
Drug policy research is at best a modestly sized field. Nonetheless, its findings have significant potential to help societies develop more effective public policies regarding marijuana, heroin, cocaine, nicotine and other psychoactive drugs. I am therefore very glad to announce that an extension of the international drug policy research integration conducted for the book Drug [...]
January 1st, 2012
Christopher Wanjeck lists the five biggest retractions of science in 2011. Some were honest errors, others were likely fraud. Here are the inaccurate findings that were later retracted: (a) Closing medical marijuana dispensaries increases crime (b) Butterflies once accidentally mated with worms, thereby creating caterpillars (c) Appendicitis should be treated with antibiotics rather than surgery [...]
December 30th, 2011
Category: Drug Policy, Health and Medicine
Tri-Care, DOD’s health insurance program, has historically refused to cover opiate substitution therapy (e.g., buprenorphine, methadone) for military personnel and family members who are addicted to pain killers and/or heroin. Harold Pollack and I wrote about this at length in American Prospect earlier this year, noting in particular that these life saving therapies not being [...]
December 20th, 2011
Category: Health and Medicine
Since I started reading tributes to the late Christopher Hitchens last week (such as Toby Young’s), I have been torn between the impulse not to upset anyone grieving the loss of a loved one and my own despair at what is inadvertently becoming an international public health miseducation campaign about addiction. Encouraged by Katha Pollitt‘s [...]