In a page-one story on sharply rising suicide rates in middle-aged Americans, Tara Parker-Pope blames "years of economic worry and easy access to prescription...
Category: suicide
In a page-one story on sharply rising suicide rates in middle-aged Americans, Tara Parker-Pope blames "years of economic worry and easy access to prescription painkillers" for making baby boomers particularly vulnerable.
From 1999 to 2010, she reports, "the suicide rate among Americans ages 35 to 64 rose by nearly 30 percent, to 17.6 deaths per 100,000 people, up from 13.7," and "the most profound increases were seen among men in their 50s, among whom suicide rates jumped by nearly 50 percent, to about 30 per 100,000."
Before we get to the speculation about the reasons for this, let's look at the numbers. Why write "nearly 30 percent" when it's shorter and more accurate to write "28.4 percent," which is what the CDC reported in...
Last night, PBS Newshour ran a tepid interview by Judy Woodruff with a scientist who is an expert on the street drugs known as bath salts. The scientist, Louis De Felice of Virginia Commonwealth...
Last night, PBS Newshour ran a tepid interview by Judy Woodruff with a scientist who is an expert on the street drugs known as bath salts. The scientist, Louis De Felice of Virginia Commonwealth University, was earnest and informed, but plainly uncomfortable on television. The interview ran for just under six minutes, but it felt longer. It dragged. At the end of it, viewers would have understood that this is an unusual and dangerous drug--and not much more. The experience was like watching a filmed version of a Wikipedia article--interesting, but not urgent or newsy.
The broadcast segment contrasts starkly with the strong and moving oneline story it was based on. Newshour's Jenny Marder wrote an almost 5,000-word piece that led with the tragic death of a 21-year-old bicycle...
14Aug 2012
Two interesting items from Nature this week:
Guns
Much of the reporting I read on the mass shooting in the Colorado theater or the Sikh killings failed to mention the two most recent U.S. government studies of gun deaths. One found that people living in homes...
Two interesting items from Nature this week:
Guns
Much of the reporting I read on the mass shooting in the Colorado theater or the Sikh killings failed to mention the two most recent U.S. government studies of gun deaths. One found that people living in homes with guns faced "a 2.7-fold greater risk of homicide" and a "4.8-fold greater risk of suicide," compared to those in homes without guns. The studies were reported in an editorial in the Aug. 9 issue of Nature.
You might be wondering why these studies were not referred to more widely, and the reason is that the studies--the newest major U.S. government research on the subject--were published in 1993 ad 1992, respectively.
"Ever since, Congress has included in annual spending laws the stipulation that none of the CDC's injury-prevention funds 'may...
Here's a crackerjack case that hits all the important issues regarding the...
Here's a crackerjack case that hits all the important issues regarding the role of the FDA in regulating drugs: Gergana Koleva reports for Forbes that Regenerative Sciences is offering a stem-cell treatment for damaged joints that has not been approved by the FDA. The agency has sued the company, claiming that its treatment--in which stem-cells are derived from a patient's bone marrow and re-injected into damaged joints, according to Koleva--should be regulated under the rules for new drugs.
Koleva quotes from ...
In most branches of medicine, illnesses are things that doctors...
In most branches of medicine, illnesses are things that doctors have encountered over the millenia, tried to understand, and sometimes learned to treat. In psychiatry, illnesses are decided by committees. No matter how bad you feel, you can't have one unless you meet the requirements the committees have established.
I'm talking, of course, about the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. You might think you're depressed, but if you don't meet the criteria in the manual, nobody else will think so--including, notably, your physician and your insurance company.
I could go on--I've written about this cookbook-recipe approach to medicine before, and I always enjoy it. But I learned something today that I didn...
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