Dr. Lynn Webster, one of the most respected pain patient advocates, managed to get through all eight episodes of Dopesick. In his review, he mentions that it wasn't half bad, provided that you like fiction. Here are his thoughts.
Policy & Ethics
In the first year of medical school, the first lecture in any class often began by explaining why this was the most crucial subject. I learned that the skin was important because it kept all the other pieces inside and that the intestine was the most important because when you spread out its inner surface, it would cover the globe. I even learned that the brain was the most important, but as George Carlin pointed out, “Look who is telling you that.” In any event, a new study tries to determine which disease is most important to us based on linguistic analysis. You are going to love this.
Some 400,000 people attended Woodstock 99 in Rome, New York. The weekend-long music festival ended in preventable disaster, and it offers an important lesson to policymakers and activists eager to ban important technologies.
Sugar-sweetened beverages, SSBs, contain added sugar, or in some cases, noncaloric sweeteners, and are nonalcoholic. As global waistlines have increased, so have taxes on these “bad boy” products – now implemented in “45 countries, including numerous subnational local jurisdictions.” A systematic review considers the impact of these taxes on raising revenue and improving health.
For those of us working, or in my case, having worked in the medical community Don Berwick is a well-known gentleman. He is the former administrator of the Center for Medicare Services, President Emeritus of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and the author of healthcare’s triple aim – expanding care, improving quality, and lowering cost. He has a new message today, the Ten Teams.
Is the U.S. heading for even more trouble from drug overdose deaths? Dr. Jeffrey Singer, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and ACSH advisor, says yes. Modelers have predicted that ODs will accelerate because of even stronger fentanyl analogs and also due to mixing drugs that should not be mixed. Anyone still blaming the overprescribing of opioid analgesics for our soaring deaths should read this.
Tracking cookies – those bite-size snippets of code that log your internet behavior – come in as many forms as recipes for chocolate chip cookies. They are ubiquitous on all commercial websites, but as it turns out they can often be found on governmental websites. How did that come to be? Part of Big Brother’s surveillance or could it be a quiet “smash and grab” by social media companies?
Politics vs. public health. California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have authorized safe consumption sites to help prevent drug overdoses, an example of harm reduction. Dr. Jeffrey Singer, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and member of the ACSH Scientific Advisory Board strenuously disagrees.
Personal injury lawyers are either revered or reviled. Sometime purveyors of junk science, they often prey on a vulnerable and scientifically averse judiciary. But things are a’changin- at least for asbestos. And that signals bad news for the talc plaintiffs.
What do Monkeypox, the opioid crisis, New Mexico fires, Kentucky flooding, and COVID-19 have in common? All have been declared public health emergencies. [1] So what exactly does a declaration of a public health emergency mean?
Cato Institute Senior Fellow Dr. Jeffrey Singer (also a member of the ACSH Scientific Advisory Board) has written a powerful piece about the inability of policymakers to realize that their plan to reduce drug overdose deaths is wrong on every level.
A critically important paper in the journal Frontiers in Pain Medicine concludes that while the rationale for reducing opioid prescriptions to minimize overdose deaths was sound between 2006-2010, during the ensuing decade the opposite was true. Reducing opioid prescriptions during this time dramatically increased deaths and hospitalizations. In other words, what worked 15 years ago is an unmitigated disaster at this time.