19th December 2011
Discovering Autism: Unraveling An Epidemic
“Rates of autism have exploded over the last 20 years. In exploring the phenomenon and its repercussions, Los Angeles Times staff writer Alan Zarembo interviewed dozens of clinicians, researchers, parents and educators and reviewed scores of scientific studies. Zarembo, along with Doug Smith and Sandra Poindexter of the Times data team, also analyzed autism rates and public spending on autism in California.
3rd March 2011
My Above-Average Stroke
“It happened on Labor Day, 2009, in Minneapolis, at a massage studio (the kind with the Japanese prints and the Peruvian flute music and the careful placement of the towel of modesty). I lay on my belly under the hands of the powerful Jamaican masseuse, Angelica, who was working on my neck and shoulders and telling me how good her life had been since she turned it over to the Lord Jesus Christ and let Him make all the decisions.
“Including what to eat?” I asked.
Yes, she said.
I started to say something witty about honey and locusts and whoa my mouth was numb, my speech slurred. My brain was melting. I heisted up on my elbows. I took a deep breath.
2nd March 2011
Past medical testing on humans revealed
“An exhaustive review by The Associated Press of medical journal reports and decades-old press clippings found more than 40 such studies. At best, these were a search for lifesaving treatments; at worst, some amounted to curiosity-satisfying experiments that hurt people but provided no useful results.
Inevitably, they will be compared to the well-known Tuskegee syphilis study. In that episode, U.S. health officials tracked 600 black men in Alabama who already had syphilis but didn’t give them adequate treatment even after penicillin became available.
These studies were worse in at least one respect - they violated the concept of “first do no harm,” a fundamental medical principle that stretches back centuries.
30th January 2011
The Hot Spotters
“For a thirty-year-old with a fever, a twenty-minute visit to the doctor’s office may be just the thing. For a pedestrian hit by a minivan, there’s nowhere better than an emergency room. But these institutions are vastly inadequate for people with complex problems: the forty-year-old with drug and alcohol addiction; the eighty-four-year-old with advanced Alzheimer’s disease and a pneumonia; the sixty-year-old with heart failure, obesity, gout, a bad memory for his eleven medications, and half a dozen specialists recommending different tests and procedures. It’s like arriving at a major construction project with nothing but a screwdriver and a crane.
24th January 2011
The Worst Case
“The legal debate surrounding repeal is complicated and multi-dimensional. But part of it revolves around a novel philosophical twist: a distinction between activity and inactivity that, repeal advocates say, makes the insurance requirement an illegitimate exercise of federal authority. It’s an arcane legal point, but, suddenly, a consequential one, and not just because of its relevance to health care. Some experts believe that a ruling striking down part of the Affordable Care Act could render vulnerable wide swaths of the regulatory state, breathing new life into a notion of limited government this country rejected a very long time ago.
10th January 2011
Bursting the Bubble
“As the “Bubble Boy,” David Vetter was famous across the U.S. Newspapers, TV shows and magazines portrayed him as a happy, well-adjusted child who struggled cheerfully against the immune deficiency that condemned him to a life inside a plastic bubble. But according to a person David called his best friend, the boy wasn’t struggling cheerfully. In 1978, although he was not quite eight years old, David had realized his life would be lonely, dull and short. His helplessness enraged him. Before he was born, his body had been donated to science.
30th December 2010
Jimmy Carter's Fight to Eradicate the Guinea Worm
“The UN had just failed in its efforts to eradicate malaria, yellow fever and the hookworm. The Guinea worm was also considered a hopeless case. But Carter recognized the worm as a potential project. At the time, the Guinea worm afflicted three-and-a-half million people in Asia and Africa every year. The plague was called the “disease of empty granaries,” because victims cannot walk and are therefore unable to bring in the harvest. “We knew that we might fail,” says Carter. “We were willing to risk failure if we believed it was worthwhile.”
29th December 2010
Meet the Ethical Placebo: A Story that Heals
“The medical establishment’s ethical problem with placebo treatment boils down to the notion that for fake drugs to be effective, doctors must lie to their patients. It has been widely assumed that if a patient discovers that he or she is taking a placebo, the mind/body password will no longer unlock the network, and the magic pills will cease to do their job. Now, however, a group of leading placebo researchers — including Irving Kirsch at the University of Hull in England (who I interview at length below) and Ted Kaptchuk at Harvard — has produced a little bombshell of a study that makes these assumptions obsolete.
