Good reads:
- Growth Needs Context – Fable – Good Fables — Context is positive if it affirms possibility and capacity. Positive context leads to useful behaviors. Positive context promotes attunement to the present state of mind and body. We can have positive context for negative circumstances and scenarios: the assumption we should flee in the presences of certain threats is a positive assumption.
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- For the Battle-Scarred, Comfort at Leash’s End — New York Times — Just weeks after Chris Goehner, 25, an Iraq war veteran, got a dog, he was able to cut in half the dose of anxiety and sleep medications he took for post-traumatic stress disorder. The night terrors and suicidal thoughts that kept him awake for days on end ceased. — Aaron Ellis, 29, another Iraq veteran with the stress disorder, scrapped his medications entirely soon after getting a dog — and set foot in a grocery store for the first time in three years.
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- Who Really Suffers If Pfizer Is Too Big To Fail? // Pharmalot — In the wake of the settlement last September in which Pfizer paid $2.3 billion for off-label marketing for the Bextra painkiller and other meds, former US Attorney Mike Loucks said the “enormous fine demonstrates that such blatant and continued disregard of the law will not be tolerated.” But it wasn’t that simple, because companies convicted of a major health care fraud are automatically excluded from Medicare and Medicaid.
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- Poisoning by prescription drugs on the rise — PhysOrg — And they aren’t looking at drugs that cause slow death. Many of the drugs we take can cause slow and steady destruction. Poisoning is now the second leading cause of unintentional injury death in the U.S. While several recent high-profile Hollywood celebrity cases have brought the problem to public attention, the rates of unintentional poisoning deaths have been on the rise for more than 15 years, and in fact, unintentional poisoning has surpassed motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of unintentional injury death among people 35-54 years of age. In a study published in the May issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers found that hospitalizations for poisoning by prescription opioids, sedatives and tranquilizers in the U.S. have increased by 65% from 1999 to 2006.
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- Medical News: Metabolic Screening Uncommon in Kids on Antipsychotics – in Psychiatry, Bipolar Disorder from MedPage Today — This is a crime happening in every doctors office that fails to monitor these deadly medications. “Most children on antipsychotic medication do not get recommended metabolic tests even though they have an increased risk of glucose and lipid abnormalities, an analysis of a Medicaid claims database showed. — About 30% of these youngsters had glucose assessments and 13% had lipid evaluations, although they were twice as likely to have glucose or lipid abnormalities as a control group of children taking asthma medication, according to an article in the April issue of Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine.”