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As much as we hate having our collective lives polluted by the ceaseless and nauseating prescription drug ads (See No, I Don't Want To Hear About Your Bent Penis While Dining) as well as being toyed with by insurance companies that seemingly create arbitrary rules to avoid paying for new, high priced drugs, there is a definite upside to many of the new products that drug companies are discovering and developing.

One area I've covered extensively is the discovery of biological drugs that have revolutionized the treatment of asthma (See...

This week, Idaho’s Republican Governor Brad Little signed HB 617 into law. The bill repeals Idaho’s five‐​year‐​old law that permits harm reduction organizations to operate syringe services programs (SSPs), also called “needle exchange” programs. Idaho becomes the first state to retrogress from the growing trend among US jurisdictions to embrace harm reduction. Lawmakers cited concerns that SSPs enable people to use illicit drugs and grumbled that there is not enough evidence SSPs entice people with substance use disorder to enter rehab...

Science can bring us all together; witness this single astrolabe built and used by Muslims, Christians, and Jews. From the NY Times, This 1,000-Year-Old Smartphone Just Dialed In

 

Quiet luxury - costly, understated goods- provide a virtue signal to the wealthy. Consider a $9,000 sweater.

“In New York, Milan or London, the fashion house Loro Piana sells a vicuña sweater for about $9,000. Barrientos’ Indigenous community of Lucanas, whose only customer is Loro Piana, receives about $280 for an equivalent amount of fiber. That doesn’t leave enough to pay Barrientos, whose village...

The process of IVF necessarily entails creating "excess" embryos – the just “in case” ones used if the first round doesn’t implant or the parents later seek additional children. Necessary hormonal adjuvants to boost ovulation and surgical oocyte removal can be hazardous. To minimize or prevent these problems, “extra” embryos are created. Destruction of these excess...

In a lively exchange with Lars Larson, we dove headfirst into the realm of groundbreaking medical advancements, touching on the pressing issue of antibiotic resistance. I highlighted promising developments in antibiotic research, including potential game-changers like Zosurabalpin and treatments for Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), which hold immense potential for combating antibiotic-resistant infections—a critical concern in the medical community.

We delved into the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in revolutionizing drug discovery, with AI algorithms streamlining the search for novel therapies and significantly reducing the time and resources required for research and development. Our conversation also touched on AI's role in improving medical imaging...

For years, stories have been published about the shortcomings of the American healthcare system, especially as it relates to pregnancy, delivery, and postpartum care. It’s commonly reported that the United States has one of the highest maternal mortality rates of high-income countries. That’s reason enough to look more closely at healthcare around pregnancy and childbirth. However, birthing stories where patients felt dismissed, discriminated against, and unheard are also all too common. With all of that in mind, let’s take a look at the role of doulas.

What is a doula?

...

“When AI contributes to patient injury, who will be held responsible?”

Great question. In the headlong rush by developers and health systems to embrace software systems using AI, little is known about how product liability and medical malpractice case law will be interpreted. A review in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) lays out some legal issues and the “somewhat faint” signals emerging from case law.

A Legal Primer

There are three possible defendants in these cases: the product developer, the physician users, and, with increasing frequency, the physician’s employer or health system providing the AI healthware. [1] While each of these actors have different “standards of care” before the law, in...

With few exceptions, the New York Times's coverage of the real story of the opioid crisis – too few pills, not too many – has been atrocious. The paper, for the most part, has been blathering the party line – that prescription opioids are driving the soaring overdose death toll. Even as late as 2017, when illicit fentanyl killed roughly twice as many people as prescription opioids we still saw inaccurate nonsense like this:

 

 

Overdoses, fueled by opioids, are the leading cause of death for Americans under 50 years old — killing...

PTSD

The experience of a profound threat can impact us all. For most, it is a transient, although deeply disturbing, experience grounded in

  • Reminders of the “exposure,” e.g., nightmares or flashbacks
  • Activation – greater irritability, a hyperarousal, that may be expressed as impulsiveness, insomnia, or anger
  • Deactivation – a psychologic distancing, numbing, avoidance or even dissociation.

For a significant minority, those alterations last for more than a month, and it is the presence of those signs and symptoms at these later moments that characterize what we call post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD.

“Why some individuals will develop PTSD following trauma,...

By now, virtually everyone knows many people who have had COVID. Although most who get it recover within a few days or weeks, it has killed 1.2 million Americans (with the weekly death toll still in the hundreds), and even those with only mild infections can experience long COVID, marked by persistent, sometimes debilitating symptoms that last for months or even years following the acute infection.

According to Scripps Research Translational Institute’s Dr. Eric Topol and coworkers in a January 2023 article in Nature Reviews Microbiology: “At least 65 million individuals worldwide have long COVID, based on a conservative...