By Stephen Wood As a nurse practitioner in a busy suburban emergency department, pain is my job. Pain is one of the most common reasons people come to an emergency department (ED). It could be abdominal pain, chest pain, back pain or even emotional pain, including depression or suicidal ideations. Pain is a driver for…
The purpose and the policies of an emergency department need to be redefined. We’re not emergency workers. We are public health providers.
By Mason Marks Suicide is a global problem that causes 800,000 deaths per year worldwide. In the United States, suicide rates rose by 25 percent in the past two decades, and suicide now kills 45,000 Americans each year, which is more than auto accidents or homicides. Traditional methods of predicting suicide, such as questionnaires administered…
By Leslie C. Griffin The New Yorker just published an article full of ethical questions about the best health care treatment for dementia patients. It should make you think about which life you would choose. Larissa MacFarquhar’s piece is titled “The Comforting Fictions of Dementia Care.” Its subtitle suggests a sad story, noting “Many facilities…
By Rebecca Dresser Anyone fortunate enough to live beyond middle age faces a risk of developing dementia. Dementia is a widely feared disability. People often say they wouldn’t want to live if they developed the condition. Experts in law and ethics praise advance directives, or instructions to follow on behalf of patients, as a…
By Yusuf Lenfest I thought I would take this opportunity to reflect on the past year, where I will be in the future, and how the student fellowship has impacted me. I still hope to contribute to the Bill of Health blog going forward, but as my last official post as a Petrie-Flom Student Fellow,…
By Yusuf Lenfest Professor Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University, rightly identifies depression as a particularly crippling disease insofar as it affects one’s very response mechanisms and modes of coping, namely, experiences of gratitude, joy, pleasure—at bottom, some of the key emotions of resistance and healing. In discussing depression, he…
By Mason Marks FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb issued a statement on Tuesday about the controversial plant Mitragyna speciosa, which is also known as kratom. According to Gottlieb, kratom poses deadly health risks. His conclusion is partly based on a computer model that was announced in his recent statement. The use of simulations to inform drug…
By Francis X. Shen This new post by Francis X. Shen appears on the Health Affairs Blog as part of a series stemming from the Sixth Annual Health Law Year in P/Review event held at Harvard Law School on Tuesday, December 12, 2017. Another year, another failed Alzheimer’s drug trial. In what is becoming routine news, in 2017, another Alzheimer’s…
Cross-posted from the Psychology Today blog, where it originally appeared on January 15, 2018. By Gali Katznelson and J. Wesley Boyd Let’s call it for what it is: Placing prisoners in solitary confinement is tantamount to torture and it needs to stop. The practice of placing incarcerated individuals in solitary confinement dates back to the 1820s in…
