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Does what you eat eventually impact the amount of medications you'll need when you’re older? Researchers investigated diets and medication amounts in 328 participants 60 years or older. Via questionnaires and measurements, the participants recounted what they ate, and the number of pills/medication...
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Results of a focus group brought to light the perspectives of 29 women (mean age 46 years) experiencing urinary tract infections (UTI). The results, reported in the Journal of Urology, identified 7 themes (below) in these categories: 1) the problems with taking antibiotics and 2) resentment towards...
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A letter published in the journal of Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy brings to light a potential new tool to combat chronic pain. Conolidine, used in traditional Chinese medicine, is a natural analgesic alkaloid that targets the atypical chemokine receptor ACKR3. Researchers say it offers...
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Children are not small adults. If drugs are first tested on adults, and they usually are, how do we know how much is too much for children? An article in Statistics in Medicine brings up these important questions for discussion. In it, researchers “propose a model based on a non‐parametric...
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Is placebo blinding necessary? It has been thought that patient blinding to a placebo was necessary for success. However, a study published in the journal Pain compared standard placebo treatment to an open-label, or “honest” placebo. The study, of patients with irritable bowel syndrome, had two...
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Threats. Harassment. Attacks. There have been reports recently about practitioners saying “No” to patients requesting opioids, and either being threatened or actually harmed. In Minnesota, five people were shot, and one killed, by a man who had been denied painkillers. A report in the Baltimore Sun...
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Newswise — A study comparing short-term outcomes of minimally invasive (MI) lumbar decompression surgery to MI lumbar spine fusion surgery found no statistically significant difference in the amount of time patients needed to return to work. Researchers at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) in New...
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From the FDA:
CURE ID is an internet-based repository that lets the clinical community report novel uses of existing drugs for difficult-to-treat infectious diseases through a website, a smartphone or other mobile device. The platform enables the crowdsourcing of medical information from health...
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Newswise — A study led by University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center researchers showed that patients who already used opioids, sedatives or antidepressants prior to colorectal surgery experience significantly more complications post-surgery.
Published in Diseases of the Colon & Rectum, the...
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Newswise—Psychedelic drugs could be effective in treating psychiatric disorders such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, but medical use of these drugs is limited by the hallucinations they cause.
“What if we could redesign drugs to keep their benefits while eliminating their...