Purdue Pharma launched OxyContin in 1996, and soon began an aggressive marketing campaign for this powerful and addictive drug. The campaign is over, but its effects are still deadly. How do we know this? Because Purdue’s marketing wasn’t sprinkled evenly around the country. Instead, Purdue rolled out its campaign in different markets at different times…
Covid-19 killed approximately 60,000 young Americans between 15 and 54 years old in 2021. By any measure, that is an awful statistic, representing a staggering number of loved ones lost to the virus.
But as awful as that statistic is, guess what killed even more young Americans.
Effective treatment + ineffective messenger = unnecessary deaths!
Those blood pressure pills could do more harm than good.
The novel coronavirus has decimated our economy at the same time as it has directly threatened our health. As if that weren’t bad enough, the economic damage Covid-19 is causing could have an indirect impact on our health. Consider what we already know about economic downturns and opioid overdoses. A research team led by Atheendar…
It’s easy to think of good healthcare as being the key to a long, healthy life. But socioeconomic circumstances often play a far bigger role in life expectancy than access to high-quality healthcare. Consider the strong relationship between socioeconomic circumstances and life expectancy in Norway, a place where healthcare access is universal. Let’s start with money. People…
The patient’s health was suffering because he couldn’t afford one of the cheapest, most effective medicines in the marketplace. He was coming back and forth to the Ann Arbor Veterans Affairs Medical Center for his care. His physician, an internal medicine trainee at the University of Michigan, tried everything in her power to help the…
Ketones are a family of chemicals made by your liver, usually out of the body’s fat, to provide energy when you need it. Right now, you’ve almost certainly got some ketones circulating in your blood. If you fast for the better part of a day, the level of ketones in your blood will rise, as…
Many of the front runners in the presidential campaign are octogenarians. President Trump, a virtual lock to be the Republican nominee, is 73 years old. Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden are 78 and 77, respectively. Which raises a question: if elected, how likely are they to survive a 4-year term in office? There’s no perfect…
Many of us have been told that urine is normally sterile, meaning that if bacteria show up in, say, a routine urine test, there must be something wrong—we need to get rid of those bacteria. But as it turns out, in many people with asymptomatic bacteriuria—people who have bacteria in their urine but no symptoms…