Day: 04/27/2015

Most states list deadly methadone as a ‘preferred drug’

http://www.pharmaciststeve.com/?p=10188

Methadone overdoses kill about 5,000 people every year, six times as many as in the late 1990s, when it was prescribed almost exclusively for use in hospitals and addiction clinics where it is tightly controlled. It is four times as likely to cause an overdose death as oxycodone, and more than twice as likely as morphine. In addition, experts say it is the most addictive of all opiates. Yet as many as 33 states make it easy for doctors to prescribe the pain medicine to Medicaid patients, no questions asked.

In those states, methadone is listed as a “preferred drug,” meaning Medicaid will cover its costs without any red tape. If a drug is not on a preferred list, doctors must explain why they are prescribing it before the prescription can be filled and paid for by Medicaid…

No, methadone is not the “most addictive” of all opiates.  It’s not even the strongest.  The problem with methadone is that it stays in your system for a long time, unlike hydrocodone and other opioids.  Pain patients and doctors don’t understand the dangers of taking methadone, and so some patients prescribed this drug have died.  But they’re dying of ignorance in how to use the drug, not from the drug itself.  Because methadone isn’t that strong of an opioid, many pain patients take it more often than what is prescribed.  However, for those who suffer from drug addiction, methadone has proven to work just fine.

In fact, methadone has similar problems like those listed for Palladone when used to treat chronic pain, which the FDA removed from the market:

http://prescriptiondrugs.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=005528

35 FDA-Approved Prescription Drugs Later Pulled from the Market

Cause for recall:  high levels of palladone could slow or stop breathing, or cause coma or death; combining the drug with alcohol use could lead to rapid release of hydromorphone, in turn leading to potentially fatally high levels of drugs in the system

And restricting the use of methadone just makes it that much harder to obtain for those who suffer from drug addiction, so that’s not the answer either.  Really, it’s hard to understand why doctors don’t know this stuff.

WordPress quickly patches second critical vulnerability

Thanks to Thumbup for this link 🙂

http://www.cio.com/article/2915654/wordpress-quickly-patches-second-critical-vulnerability.html?google_editors_picks=true

Administrators are advised to upgrade to WordPress version 4.2.1. Some WordPress sites that are compatible with and use a plugin called Background Update Tester will update automatically.

WordPress is one of the most-used Web publishing platforms. By the company’s own estimation, it runs 23 percent of the sites on the Internet, including major publishers such as Time and CNN…

Am I an “administrator”?  I don’t know.  And does WordPress update automatically, like Microsoft?  I don’t know that either.  I’m not sure what they’re talking about in this article, but it’s always good to be as informed as possible.

Five ways the DEA is redundant

http://www.pharmaciststeve.com/?p=10180

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/04/26/1379265/-Five-ways-the-DEA-is-redundant

The marijuana issue also played into the culture wars of the time. President Nixon saw a connection between civil rights and anti-war demonstrators and marijuana use […] Nixon discussed this with entertainer Art Linkletter claiming: “. . . radical demonstrators that were here . . . two weeks ago . . . They’re all on drugs, virtually all.”
[…]
In another conversation he links drug use, homosexuality and immorality to the downfall of great countries concluding: “You see, homosexuality, dope, immorality in general. These are the enemies of strong societies. That’s why the Communists and the left-wingers are pushing the stuff, they’re trying to destroy us.” …

On May 11, 2012, four Afro-Indigenous villagers, including a 14-year-old boy, were killed during the course of a drug interdiction raid in Ahuas, Honduras. Three others were seriously wounded. At least ten U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents participated in the mission as members of a Foreign-Deployed Advisory Support Team (FAST), a DEA unit first created in 2005 in Afghanistan. According to the New York Times, Honduran police agents that were part of the May 11 operation “told government investigators that they took their orders from the D.E.A.” …

Privacy error at Time.com

This is the error message I got, along with the URL showing the https crossed out in red:

Your connection is not private

Attackers may be trying to steal your information from time.com (for example, passwords, messages, or credit cards).  NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID

I guess I don’t need to be on an https URL to visit Time.com, but still… makes you wonder.

Good thing we don’t have to pay for Tesla’s tax breaks in NM

https://fortune.com/2015/04/27/gigafactory-obsolete/

A disruptive shadow looms over Tesla Motors’ giant Nevada “gigafactory”—the threat of rapidly advancing battery technology. While plenty of hurdles face new battery tech, the emergence of a viable and significantly better battery in the next five years could turn Tesla’s $5 billion facility for mass producing lithium-ion batteries into a giga-albatross…

https://painkills2.wordpress.com/2015/01/14/why-tesla-stock-is-plummeting-right-now/

The Smile Of A Child

“Most smiles are started by another smile.”  Frank A. Clark

https://blog.bufferapp.com/the-science-of-smiling-a-guide-to-humans-most-powerful-gesture

That’s why we often feel happier around children – they smile more. On average, they do so 400 times a day. Whilst happy people still smile 40-50 times a day, the average of us only does so 20 times…

http://www.completelyyou.com/feature/import/smiling_facts/#.VT4UOSFViko

Did you know it takes 17 muscles to smile and 43 to frown? Here, 10 surprising truths about grinning.

Some studies show that beaming can benefit your blood pressure levels. Add a laugh and you’ll also slim your middle — the movement exercises your abs, diaphragm, shoulders and heart. Scientists at Vanderbilt University found that laughing can stoke your calorie burn by up to 20 percent…

Fact: The average woman smiles approximately 62 times a day. In that same day, a man only flashes his pearly whites a mere eight times…

Research conducted at the University of Illinois has suggested that people who generally feel happy and smile more often have a longer life expectancy of nearly a decade. Another study looked at baseball cards. The Wayne State University scientists concluded that those athletes who were flashing their pearly whites in their pictures lived on average seven years longer than those who didn’t…

Research shows that the simple act of turning your mouth up, whether authentic or not, can help release endorphins, feel-good hormones. Serotonin, a chemical that’s a natural stress-reducer, is also increased when you smile…

Every time you flash your teeth, your body produces greater quantities of antibodies and T-cells (or white blood cells), which may give your immune system a huge power boost…

(Photo taken 4/25/2015.)

This Bizarre Trick Will Get A Catchy Song Out Of Your Head

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/25/song-stuck-in-head_n_7129586.html

Do you have an obnoxiously catchy song lyric stuck on repeat in your brain? New research suggests that the secret to getting rid of these “earworms” may be as simple as chewing a stick of gum…

How does it work? Reading psychologist Dr. Phil Beaman explained that chewing gum co-opts some of the brain’s regions involved in earworms.

“Brain regions involved in hearing, remembering and imagining tunes include not only the auditory cortex but also regions more usually associated with speech production,” Beaman told The Huffington Post in an email. “By forcing these regions to be active in chewing the gum, they were less available to support the involuntary generation or recollection of an earworm.”

Beyond earworms, Beaman hopes that the research may pave the way for methods of managing more debilitating invasive thoughts in people with psychiatric conditions.

“Interfering with our own ‘inner speech’ through a more sophisticated version of the gum-chewing approach may work more widely,” he said in a statement. “However, more research is needed to see whether this will help counter symptoms of obsessive-compulsive and similar disorders.” …

Unfortunately, TMJ patients like myself can’t chew gum.  (And I really miss bubble gum.)

What My 10-Year-Old Daughter Taught Me About the Death of Freddie Gray

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-howard/what-my-10-year-old-daughter-taught-me-about-the-death-of-freddie-gray_b_7136788.html

“I don’t like Black people” a little girl said to my daughter earlier this week in school. My daughter, who is Black, was stunned to hear these seemingly out-of-nowhere words from her non-Black classmate…

The kind of thinking that teaches someone that a Black man or woman standing somewhere is suspicious simply because of the color of his skin also comes from somewhere…