Day: 05/03/2015

Blood pressure med for PTSD

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prazosin

Prazosin is orally active and has a minimal effect on cardiac function due to its alpha-1 receptor selectivity. However, when prazosin is started, heart rate and contractility go up in order to maintain the pre-treatment blood pressures because the body has reached homeostasis at its abnormally high blood pressure. The blood pressure lowering effect becomes apparent when prazosin is taken for longer periods of time. The heart rate and contractility go back down over time and blood pressure decreases.

The antihypertensive characteristics of prazosin make it a second-line choice for the treatment of high blood pressure.

Prazosin is also useful in treating urinary hesitancy associated with prostatic hyperplasia, blocking alpha-1 receptors, which control constriction of both the prostate and urethra. Although not a first line choice for either hypertension or prostatic hyperplasia, it is a choice for patients who present with both problems concomitantly.

This medication has shown to be effective in treating severe nightmares in children and people with PTSD symptoms. Veterans have also been treated successfully at Seattle’s VA Puget Sound Health Care System (VAPSHCS) for sleep disturbance related to PTSD. Doses are lower for this purpose than for control of blood pressure.

Prazosin holds promise as a pharmacologic treatment for alcohol dependence after a 2009 pilot trial was completed. A larger controlled Phase II “Clinical Trial of the Adrenergic Alpha-1 Antagonist Prazosin for Alcohol Dependence” is currently underway.

The drug is usually recommended for severe stings from Indian Red Scorpion Hottentotta tamulus in Indian Subcontinent…

Wow, that’s a lot of uses for just one drug.  I didn’t know that doctors were prescribing blood pressure medication for PTSD.  It is also used off-label for chronic pain (although it didn’t help me).

Be nice to your neighbors, or else

https://lindanee.wordpress.com/2015/05/03/invasions-of-privacy-while-on-claim-how-do-you-feel-about-it/

Most insureds are also not aware insurance companies can go knocking on their neighbors’ doors to obtain information about day-to-day activities. This is officially referred to as an “activities check” and can be quite disconcerting when “disability activities” are shared with neighbors. If a neighbor has an axe to grind with an insured, this is the time when it becomes apparent…

PDMPs, voting rights and discrimination

https://myfridayblog.wordpress.com/2015/05/03/what-i-read-on-wp-why-6-revenge-of-the-six/

https://seniorsforademocraticsociety.wordpress.com/2015/03/06/greg-palast-on-the-new-jim-crow/

Obviously I was not speaking with King Jr.—a bullet stole him from us in 1968. The question was posed by his son, Martin Luther King III. I spent an afternoon at his home in Atlanta, where we pored over the latest evidence that Americans of color were blocked at the doors to the polls in the 2014 midterm elections—by the hundreds of thousands.

As King’s 6-year-old daughter serenaded us with her toy drum set, we dived into a massive, secretive database used by elections officials—almost all of them Republicans—in 28 states. The scheme, called “Interstate Crosscheck,” threatens to disqualify the ballots of over a million voters, overwhelmingly citizens of color…

According to the GOP officials, these citizens had voted twice in the same election, in two different states—a federal crime. As punishment, their mail-in ballots would be junked and their registrations annulled. But no reporters had seen (or, for that matter, asked for) the lists. State officials, the modern-day equivalents of Bull Connor, refused our requests on grounds that these Americans were all suspects in a criminal investigation and therefore the files were confidential…

The lists go on like that: huge numbers accused solely on the basis of sharing a first and last name with a voter in another state.

It is clear what attracts Republican Katherine Harris wannabes to this absurd method of identifying fraudulent voters. The prevalence of name-sharing among black Americans is a legacy of slavery. The “Crosscheck” name-match game is also a darn good way of knocking off Hispanic voters…

I have to wonder if this database, used for Interstate Crosscheck, is also used by law enforcement — although it doesn’t appear as sophisticated as the PDMPs used for pain patients. After all, it doesn’t take much for a search function to find similar first and last names.  But it’s also a database that crosses state borders, just like the PDMPs. And it wouldn’t seem that hard for law enforcement to utilize both databases.  Does law enforcement have access to databases which include voting information?  I dunno, but they appear to have easy access to PDMPs.

I posted these links because nobody really knows what goes on behind the political scene, whether it’s how laws are created or what happens to all of our votes.  (Discrimination in voting laws affects everyone, not just people of color.)  It’s the same for the drug war, whose activities are shrouded for confidentiality reasons of potential and alleged crimes.  And PDMP databases are part of the drug war.

As a chronic pain patient, maybe you don’t mind having your name in the PDMP database.  If you’re a medical cannabis patient, maybe you don’t mind having your name in the state’s database.  After all, everyone is included in their state’s driver’s license database, which are now used across state borders by law enforcement, for purposes like allowing me to buy Claritan-D.

Then there’s our Social Security numbers, assigned to everyone at birth (and, I assume, reassigned after death).  It’s the number most commonly used to identify a person, and used by both state and federal databases.  Used by companies to identify employees, by banks to identify customers, and the list goes on.

All of these databases that hold our identifying information don’t seem too threatening.  I mean, we need drivers to register both themselves and their cars for all kinds of reasons, like insurance. And I can’t cash a check without a driver’s license, even though you don’t need one for a debit or credit card.

What I’m trying to point out is that all this digital information is freely available to law enforcement, whether we like it or not.  Freely available to any corporation or individual that wants to pay for it.

I guess PDMPs are part of our new digital era.  But just like voter databases, they can be used against us, and not only by law enforcement — by doctors, the health care industry, employers, and insurance companies, to name a few.

If you want to know how the chronic pain patient population will look in the future, just look at how some people have been discriminated against just because of the color of their skin.  And just like the color of your skin, chronic pain doesn’t ever go away — it’s a label pain patients wear for life — now memorialized forever in the PDMPs.

Female Scientists Told To Add A Male Author To Their Study

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/01/sexist-peer-review_n_7190656.html

A scientific journal sparked a Twitter firestorm when it rejected two female scientists’ work partly because the paper they submitted did not have male co-authors…

Evolutionary geneticists Fiona Ingleby and Megan Head collaborated on a study of gender bias in academia. They found that women with a PhD in biology published fewer articles than their male peers, which the authors argued showed gender bias, reports Times Higher Education.

When the women submitted the study to peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE, a male reviewer came back with some pretty shocking suggestions…

The women’s reviewer also suggested the publishing gap could exist because middle-aged female scientists preferred spending time with their children to working in a lab…

Is he trying to say that fathers would prefer to work rather than spend time with their kids?

Scientists Issue Warning Over Chemicals Common In Carpets, Coats, Cookware

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/01/madrid-statement-dupont-chemicals_n_7191496.html

In 1961, a DuPont toxicologist warned colleagues that exposure to their company’s increasingly popular Teflon chemicals enlarged the livers of rats and rabbits. Studies over the following decades found no safe level of exposure in animals and determined that humans, too, got sick when exposed to the chemicals — which were also seen to build up in the body and resist breakdown in the environment.

Nonstick, it turned out, tends to stick around.

By the end of 2015, some of these most notorious polyfluoroalkyl and perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFASs, will be fully phased out of use in the U.S. But emerging in their place, warn environmental health experts, are another group of PFASs that share many of the same concerning characteristics…

Mentoring Inquiries Surge After Baltimore Riots

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/02/mentoring-baltimore-big-brothers-big-sisters_n_7193072.html

More than 300 inquiries about mentoring young people have poured into Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Chesapeake, the branch of the nonprofit serving the city, from adults interested in working with one of the 600-plus kids on the local waiting list, according to a press release. That compares with 641 inquiries received from Baltimore in all of 2014…

Big Brothers Big Sisters said research shows that after 18 months of mentoring, little brothers and little sisters were 46 percent less likely to use illegal drugs, 27 percent less likely to begin using alcohol, 52 percent less likely to skip school and 33 percent less likely to hit someone than children not in the program, according to the organization’s press release…

It’s very important for kids to have face time with the adults in their life.  For disabled people like me, it would be difficult to be a mentor — but that doesn’t mean I can’t mentor a young person on the internet (whether they want me to, or not). 🙂

Being Underweight Linked To Higher Dementia Risk

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/01/underweight-dementia-risk_n_7183294.html

The observations contradict many previous, much smaller, studies that tied obesity to increased dementia risk…

They also examined rates of death in all weight categories and found that underweight people were at the highest risk of dying, followed by those who were very obese. People who were modestly overweight were slightly less likely than those in the healthy BMI range to die. And the lowest risk of death was at a BMI of 26…

I don’t know what my BMI is, and I don’t care.  If you want to live longer, maybe you should just stop worrying about numbers like this.

Tracy Chapman Singing ‘Stand By Me’ Will Break Your Heart

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/01/tracy-chapman-stand-by-me_n_7192080.html

Ben E. King, the lead singer for the Drifters and solo star whose voice graced classics like “Stand by Me,” ”There Goes My Baby” and “Spanish Harlem,” died on Friday at 76.

Barely two weeks earlier, another legendary singer-songwriter, Tracy Chapman, covered “Stand by Me” during an appearance on “The Late Show with David Letterman.”

Brought To You By The Letter “V” (And Honeysuckle Week)

That’s right, the honeysuckle are finally in bloom in the Q.  (Hey, that rhymes.)  And so I’m declaring this Honeysuckle Week.  No, none of the photos I post this week will be scratch-n-sniff, but the aliens told me that kind of technology will be here real soon. 🙂

The crabapple trees here in the Q (photos to be posted sometime in the future) are very popular with the bees, but not so with the honeysuckle…

http://www.beemaster.com/forum/index.php?topic=15728.0

Re: Do bees use honeysuckle?

Doak said:  I have 2 kinds. One blooms early< Jan/Feb, and the other later.
The early is the bushy type with a short more open bloom, This is the one the bees go for.
The other, longer vine type with the longer narrow bloom, the bees can’t get to the nectar because of the configuration of the bloom…

No, this does not look like a nice man, but…

http://krqe.com/2015/05/02/police-thief-hit-every-albuquerque-target-store/

ALBUQUERQUE (KRQE) – Police say a thief spent two months targeting every Target store in Albuquerque. According to a criminal complaint, William Ainsworth hit five stores over the span of two months, stealing higher end goods typically locked in cabinets.

Police say Ainsworth would walk into stores and use what’s known as an “alpha key” to unlock cabinets protecting fragrances and electronics. In February, he hit the Lomas location and Montgomery location within an hour of each other.

In all, Ainsworth is accused of stealing $9,179 worth of goods including Beats by Dre headphones and speakers, smart watches, digital cameras and fragrances.

As of Saturday afternoon, Ainsworth was behind bars on a $20,000 cash or surety bond.

Online court records show Ainsworth has a lengthy criminal past including a 2007 incident where he later pled guilty to choking and stabbing Rozco the police dog while he was being chased by officers. The dog bit Ainsworth back and ultimately survived.

With all the surveillance, cameras on every corner, it’s hard to believe that someone could get away with this kind of crime.  In fact, he would have to be pretty smart to do so.  And for about, let’s say, six months of work, he got $9,000 worth of merchandise.  He would re-sell that merchandise at a mark-up, let’s say 100%.  He made $18,000 for six months of work, that’s $36,000 annually.

Well, at least he’s not dealing drugs, right?  Just consumerism.  He’ll be sent to prison, again, and that’s another person we’ve given to the prison industry, along with his family and friends, who now have to pay for the privilege of seeing and talking to him.

I don’t know how I would defend myself against an attack dog, but since I don’t carry a knife, I assume that if it had been me and the dog, I’d have lots of leftover scars from the encounter. Heck, I’ve been lucky not to get scarred by friendly dogs:

https://painkills2.wordpress.com/2015/03/25/two-things-to-avoid-while-taking-pictures/