noreply@blogger.com (RCoffield@fsblaw.com)
In apologizing for his high-profile sex scandal, golfer Tiger Woods said today that he has been in intensive therapy for 45 days and will be returning for more sessions starting tomorrow. His reference to his affairs and “repeated irresponsible behavior” prompts us to take a closer look at a condition that many […]
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noreply@blogger.com (RCoffield@fsblaw.com)
Tomorrow’s mental illnesses went online today: The American Psychiatric Association posted a draft version of the DSM-V. Read it for yourself.
The DSM (full name: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) is the book that defines mental illness in America, so it’s not surprising that revising the thing is a contentious process […]
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noreply@blogger.com (RCoffield@fsblaw.com)
Here’s a quick drug-news roundup:
More than two-thirds of patients who took an experimental impotence drug were able to have sex within 15 minutes, according to Vivus, the company that’s developing the drug. (Among patients who took a placebo, the success rate within 15 minutes was less than one third, by the way.) […]
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noreply@blogger.com (RCoffield@fsblaw.com)
For patients with mild depression, a couple popular antidepressants don’t work any better than placebos, according to a study in this week’s JAMA that mined data from previously published studies. Earlier analyses have come to similar conclusions.
The typical conclusion from studies like these is that antidepressants don’t work for mild to moderate […]
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JGrimes
Sure, docs are seeing a lot of patients these days. But writing 96,685 prescriptions to Medicaid patients over the course of 21 months — that’s about 150 scripts a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year — is still enough to catch the attention of the feds.
Sen. Chuck Grassley raised questions […]
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JGrimes
The FDA today approved the use of two antipsychotic drugs — Eli Lilly’s Zyprexa and AstraZeneca’s Seroquel — in teenagers. But the agency also said it wants to know more about the risk of weight gain and diabetes in kids who take those and other antipsychotic drugs.
It’s clear that those risks are broadly […]
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Jacob Goldstein
As every smoker knows, nicotine does all sorts of interesting things to your brain. Cigarette companies know this too, and back in the 1990s R.J. Reynolds created a unit called Targacept to try to develop new drugs that mimicked some of the effects of nicotine — which the company had been studying […]
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JGrimes
Yes, the headline we just wrote for this post sounds a little like those cheesy “one simple rule” online ads. But that’s our headline and we’re sticking to it.
Anyway: In her health column this week, the WSJ’s Melinda Beck lists 20 health-related things to be thankful for. Most are improvements in public health […]
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JGrimes
For people in their late teens and early 20s, taking an antidepressant may actually increase the risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors, at least during initial treatment. So it’s important that those patients are carefully monitored.
Citing the rising number of suicides among active-duty soldiers in the U.S. Army, a senator wrote to the […]
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JGrimes
So Omnicare, a big pharmacy that specializes in providing drugs to nursing-home patients, will pay $98 million to settle allegations that the company “solicited or paid a variety of kickbacks,” according to this statement from the feds.
The WSJ story gets into all the details, but one wrinkle in particular caught our eye: Omnicare […]
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