Category: Medicine

"...it shouldn't be against the law to be sick."

8/7/2019

"In the 1980s and 1990s, heroin gripped [Portugal], resulting in the highest HIV infection rate in the European Union. One out of every 100 people in Portugal used the drug.

Faced with an unprecedented health crisis, the government tried something unheard of, and decriminalized drug possession and consumption in 2001. The country flipped how it spent money on addiction, moving the majority of funds formerly spent on criminal punishment into treatment, and gave its health ministry responsibility for drug-related issues rather than law enforcement.

This led to a shift in how people thought about one another. “Those who had been referred to sneeringly as 'drogados' (junkies)—became known more broadly, more sympathetically, and more accurately, as ‘people who use drugs’ or ‘people with addiction disorders,’” a 2017 Guardian article about Portugal’s policy noted.

Portugal opened an overdose-prevention center only recently, but not because of ideological opposition—because it has already come so far in reducing overdose deaths that the spaces were less urgently required. The results of Portugal’s drug policy when compared to the results of the United States’ drug policy are staggering. In Portugal, 27 people died of drug overdoses in 2016. The country is on track to whittle its overdose deaths to a single digit.

In the United States, more than 60,000 people died of drug overdoses in 2016. The next year, the last with comprehensive data, was no better. “We lost 70,000 of our loved ones in 2017,” Beyer said.

The underlying idea motivating Portugal’s policymakers and the people fighting for overdose-prevention spaces is the same: People who are addicted to drugs should be treated as people in need of medical care, and it shouldn’t be against the law to be sick."

https://www.theringer.com/2019/8/6/20756144/overdose-prevention-site-us-2019

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On "waking up" from autism.

5/1/2016

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This article explores the results of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) on patients with autism, and the ethical questions that arise.

From one patient's recollections:
"I left the hospital figuring nothing had happened: I was thinking to myself, What kind of crazy fool was I to think that I was gonna do this TMS and suddenly the world was gonna change? But then I got in the car to go home, and I turned on my iPod and it just hit me that the music was real and alive. It had a power and clarity I hadn’t experienced before, and I started thinking about who the song was written for and what it was about. After that, I just saw this brilliant clarity of the music."

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The Man Who Lost His Body

9/11/2014

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In the early seventies, Ian Waterman lost all sense of proprioception, which is the body's nearly unconscious sense of position in space -- how you know where your arm or toe is without having to think about it. Incredibly, he has managed to learn to walk again, gesture again, manipulate objects and live a relatively normal life again.

This is a BBC documentary about him and his incredible concentration.

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Can You Call A 9-Year-Old A Psychopath?

5/25/2014

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"The idea that a young child could have psychopathic tendencies remains controversial among psychologists. Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University, has argued that psychopathy, like other personality disorders, is almost impossible to diagnose accurately in children, or even in teenagers — both because their brains are still developing and because normal behavior at these ages can be misinterpreted as psychopathic. Others fear that even if such a diagnosis can be made accurately, the social cost of branding a young child a psychopath is simply too high. (The disorder has historically been considered untreatable.) John Edens, a clinical psychologist at Texas A&M University, has cautioned against spending money on research to identify children at risk of psychopathy. “This isn’t like autism, where the child and parents will find support,” Edens observes. “Even if accurate, it’s a ruinous diagnosis. No one is sympathetic to the mother of a psychopath.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/magazine/can-you-call-a-9-year-old-a-psychopath.html?pagewanted=1&_r=3&ref=general&src=me&

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"...it shouldn't be against the law to be sick."

On "waking up" from autism.

The Man Who Lost His Body

Can You Call A 9-Year-Old A Psychopath?

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