On March 25, 1911 a devastating inferno consumed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York's lower Manhattan. There, 146 workers – mostly young immigrant women – either perished or jumped to their deaths to escape the ravaging flames. Some who reached the lobby were prevented from exiting because of the “raining” bodies falling from above. But the carnage proved far worse because, infamously, other exits had been locked.
Harm Reduction
A new study employs some blatantly obvious sleight of hand to amplify the so-called teen vaping 'epidemic.' Here's what you need to know.
“For a man's house is his castle, and each man's home is his safest refuge.” With that phrasing, English common law reinvented the Castle Doctrine, the concept that one may be safe and protect one’s home. With time, the definition of our “home” expanded into the space around us, morphing from the Castle Doctrine to Stand Your Ground. A new study looks at how those laws have changed our behavior.
Nurses, more so than physicians, are joining the Great Resignation. 32% say they are heading for the exits, up from 22% just a few months ago.
Another day, another bad vaping study makes headlines. This time researchers speculate that e-cigarette use may increase your risk for prediabetes.
What chemicals, specifically, pose a danger as a potential human carcinogen? To address this issue two competing approaches, which use scientific data to evaluate chemicals for this danger, are at odds. Can we tease out which of these two may be “better”?
It is indeed another day and time to complete my deeper look at the origin and uses of Morphine Milligram Equivalents (MME). It is time to consider the uncertainty introduced in how MMEs are calculated and how that makes the research on MME a minefield of unintended errors and variation.
Virus particles come from people, like you and me, when we are ill, even before we are symptomatic. While the necessity for masks for this pandemic may be ending, barrier face coverings (BFC) may, in the future, reduce exposure to particles of concern - other viruses. Here is the work of my organization.
They are the foundation of the CDC's 2016 opioid guidelines, resulting in legislation that limits opioid prescribing in 36 states. Morphine milligram equivalents, or MMEs, are used to set arbitrary prescribing limits for opioids by physicians, since many state legislators fail to understand – and translate into policy and law – the ‘16 guidelines. If we had all known the history of MMEs, perhaps we would not have been so eager to embrace them.
Horseshoe crabs, those almost pre-historic-looking creatures that we occasionally see washed up on the shore, hold a special place in medicine. But that's about to change.
A new study in JAMA Network Open is a follow-up to a 2015 study done by the same researchers. The questions are: Do you store loaded guns at home? Are they locked or not? Do you store guns that are loaded and unlocked? This is not about the right to bear arms, but the responsibility to store them safely around children.
“[From] mid-July through mid-November, 2021, more than one million individuals with COVID-19 were admitted to hospitals, 156,382 of them died of COVID-19 complications. Most of these hospital admissions and patient deaths were preventable through… vaccines.” [1] But vaccine resistance continues to be strong, persuasion, as I’ve written, is ineffective on a large enough scale, and those opposing mandates speak loudly. The situation is likely to continue. If vaccine-resistant intransigence is entrenched, will mandates work?