Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Do You Know Where Your Medicine Came From?

January 6, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Foreign, Inspection-Free Drugs in Your Medicine Cabinet

Headaches. Insomnia. Anxiety. American medicine cabinets are packed with remedies for these common maladies. And up to 40 percent of them are manufactured overseas (along with 80 percent of active ingredients for pharmaceuticals). But a recent report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office estimated that in fiscal year 2009, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration visited just 11 percent of the 3,765 foreign factories it is responsible for inspecting — compared to 40 percent of domestic factories. In 2008, the GAO found that the FDA took two to five years to follow up with foreign plants ... Read More

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Placebo Effect Stronger Than We Thought?

January 4, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

In July 2001, the Amgen Corporation announced the failure, in a second-stage clinical trial, of an experimental drug to treat Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative illness that affects nerve cells in the brain. Such a failure was hardly unusual; only a minority of the drugs that undergo trials make it to the marketplace. But for Perry Cohen, who had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s several years before, at age 50, the announcement brought both surprise and disappointment. Cohen, an MIT-trained PhD who had spent decades advising health-care organizations on how to evaluate medical care, had ... Read More

More like this: Health, January-February 2012, Magazine Feature Story
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California’s Medical Marijuana Morass

January 3, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

In California, annual retail sales of medical marijuana may be as high as $1.3 billion. But to use it, people have to grow it, and deliver it, and the laws governing the substance are anything but clear. What’s more, the feds’ official position is: no marijuana is legal. And they’re cracking down. Writer David Freed takes us on a road trip through the medical marijuana morass as part of the “Medicine on the Front Lines” report in the January-February 2012 issue of Miller-McCune magazine. We’re riding south out of Northern California’s Humboldt County, pushing 75 miles an ... Read More

More like this: Cover Story, January-February 2012, Legal Affairs
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Turning Cellphones Into Mobile Microscopes

October 26, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

You can use your cellphone to take pictures, get driving directions, and free imprisoned angry birds. And perhaps soon, analyze microscopic blood samples. Three separate University of California research teams have each concocted a new technology that converts just about any handset with a decent camera into a mobile microscope. That’s a development that could have a huge impact on medicine in developing countries-allowing health care workers in shantytowns and rural villages far from a hospital to diagnose malaria, HIV, and other diseases on the spot. All three teams of UC researchers ... Read More

More like this: Health, News and Options, November-December 2011
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New Sports Therapy Redefines the Body’s Core

October 7, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Alexandra Stevenson has been holding a tennis racket ever since she can remember. The decision to go pro at 18 took her from the relative comfort of a scholarship offer at UCLA and thrust her into the pressure cooker of competition. It also exposed her body to the kind of beating that mere mortals can only dream about. Having suffered a number of injury-related setbacks over the ensuing years, Stevenson thought her career was through by 2010. But then, something changed. After being carried off a Sydney court with a foot injury in February of last year, she decided to try a new kind of ... Read More

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Why I Quit Primary Care: One Doctor’s Story

October 2, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Why I Quit Primary Care: One Doctor's Story

By most measures, Frederick M. Barken, M.D.,  was a success as a primary care doctor. He ran a solo practice in rural upstate New York with 3,000 patients; he was well respected, and he earned a comfortable income. But after 25 years, at the relatively young age of 51, he'd had enough. In his new book, Out of Practice: Fighting for Primary Care Medicine in America, Barken tells how he was driven out by the extraordinary demands of a frail and befuddled elderly clientele in the era of "fast food" medical care. It wasn't just the nonmedical requirements of the job that got to him, like ... Read More

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Ritalin Can Wake the Brain From Anesthesia

September 21, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Rats Awake With Ritalin

Anesthesia is one of the most common surgical practices, and also one of the most mysterious. In the operating room, doctors have no reliable tools to reverse anesthesia once it starts, because no one understands the neurological mechanisms that switch on consciousness. The only way to pull a patient out of anesthesia is to let the drugs dissipate from the body. Now, a new study shows that Ritalin — the same drug used to treat attention deficit disorder in children — has the power to wake the brain from general anesthesia. The study, which will appear in the October issue of ... Read More

More like this: Health, Today in Mice
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Among Antibiotics, Resistance Knows No Bounds

September 15, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Since penicillin was isolated from a fungus in 1929, mankind's stockpile of antibiotics has expanded to include a diversity of life-saving compounds. However, from streptomycin in the 1940s to synthetics such as ciprofloxacin in the late 1980s, they are losing their effectiveness. While the idea that we are losing some potent antibiotic weapons is widely known, that's not the same as it being widely understood, says Jo Handelsman, Howard Hughes Medical Institute professor of microbiology at Yale University. She cautions that what researchers know and what the public knows are not the ... Read More

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A Legacy of 9/11: Years of Increased Illness

September 9, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

To most Americans, the 9/11 terrorist attacks were shocking, frightening, enraging. Newly published research suggests they were also, quite literally, sickening. Two University of California, Irvine, researchers report the tragedy triggered a large and lingering rise in self-reported health problems, as well as visits to medical professionals, across the nation. Among a nationally representative sample of about 2,000 American adults, reports of physical ailments increased 18 percent over the three years following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. This story originally posted on July ... Read More

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Making Medical Miracles With Inkjet Printers

March 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

You've probably owned an inkjet printer or two — one of those homely plastic boxes that performs mundane functions like scanning pictures and spitting out boarding passes while running through pricy ink cartridges like nobody's business. Where most of us behold an unremarkable piece of office equipment, Tao Xu sees a mechanical marvel. He has helped to pioneer ways to use those same inkjet devices to "print" cardiac tissue to repair a sick heart or create precise micro-assays that will slash the cost of testing new drugs. Xu, an assistant engineering professor at the University of ... Read More

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