A wide array of drugs can cause nightmares. The list includes certain antidepressants, antibiotics, beta blockers, blood-pressure medications, statins for lowering cholesterol and drugs for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Some drugs tend to cause bad dreams when they are first taken; others bring nightmares when they’re stopped. Alcohol, over-the-counter antihistamines and some dietary supplements have the same effect.
Full story on how some drugs can cause nightmares.
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As I said in my last “Myth Busters” post, the health policy community came to view risk pools as being a big pool of money to be allocated according to need. In that sense, there was little difference between insurance companies and government agencies. Both collected vast sums of money from a large number of people and spent it however their governing bodies determined.
The only problem, in this view, is that the governing bodies of insurance companies are unelected and unaccountable. They tend to be wealthy white males who are driven by greed and prejudice. Therefore, they deny benefits to certain classes of people women, the mentally ill, the addicted. And they have little appreciation for the role of certain providers like nurses, psychologists, massage therapists, and so on.
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Substance abuse may have played a role in yet another death in the music industry.
Mikey Welsh, former bass player for Weezer, was found unresponsive at a hotel room in Chicago on Saturday. It is believed that his death may have been brought about by a drug overdose.
Welsh performed as bass player with Weezer, from 1998 to 2001. He left the group after suffering from a nervous breakdown, and eventually built a second career as a painter.
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But most striking of all was the flurry of activation in the insular cortex of the brain, which is associated with feelings of love and compassion. The subjects brains responded to the sound of their phones as they would respond to the presence or proximity of a girlfriend, boyfriend or family member.
In short, the subjects didnt demonstrate the classis brain-based signs of addictions. Instead they loved their iPhones.
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A person’s response to caffeine has been linked to how the person may respond to other stimulant drugs, such as cocaine and amphetamines, based on the results of a study conducted by U.S. researchers.
The study, conducted by Stacey Sigmon of the University of Vermont College of Medicine and co-author Roland Griffiths of The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, categorized participants as caffeine choosers and non-choosers, through a choice procedure. Choosers were defined as those who chose caffeine over placebo, in seven out of ten choices per session, while non-choosers were defined as those who chose placebo over caffeine.
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October is breast cancer awareness month, and there are a lot of things that we can do to support breast cancer research, and spread awareness about the disease.
One of the things that we can do is to buy pink anytime this month, as manufacturers and businesses also give their support for breast cancer research by donating a portion of the proceeds of selected pink products.
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Four U.S. attorneys in the state of California announced that federal authorities are coming down hard on the states medical marijuana industry.
Prosecutors are paying special attention to businesses that may be feigning legitimacy under California law, which allows certain patients to possess marijuana for medical purposes. At a press briefing, U.S. attorney for Californias central district Andre Birotte Jr. shared: Its the new California gold rush Theres an epidemic of these marijuana stores.
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Nearly half of U.S. households are receiving government benefits:
Means-tested programs, designed to help the needy, accounted for the largest share of recipients last year. Some 34.2% of Americans lived in a household that received benefits such as food stamps, subsidized housing, cash welfare or Medicaid (the federal-state health care program for the poor). Another 14.5% lived in homes where someone was on Medicare (the health care program for the elderly). Nearly 16% lived in households receiving Social Security.
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It may take a whole lot of convincing before some prostate cancer patients will concede to anyone that will recommend that men forego PSA screenings altogether, but in the interest of keeping readers informed about the latest developments in prostate cancer research, we share this piece of information.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force may soon recommend that men forego undergoing screening for prostate cancer, in very much the same way they previously recommended that women in their 40s do not need to undergo mammograms.
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The authors lament that the therapy costs roughly $100,000 a head. “The treatment is proven to be effective,” muses the report, “but how shall we determine its value?” The report’s royal “we” returns again and again to such questions, claiming that “we overdiagnose, overtreat and overpromise.” And the main cure the report proposes lies not necessarily in more or better medicine, but in more allegedly enlightened forms of rationing and price controls.
The authors hope that ObamaCare’s various commissions will “lead to a wider application of cost-effectiveness based criteria for determining treatment entitlements in America.” They even recommend integrating cost-effectiveness with the Food and Drug Administration’s clinical approvals, along with tighter regulation of off-label drug use, which would be a disaster for terminally ill patients.
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