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The Last Day of the Guarantee

A box of prescription drugs sat forgotten in the back closet of a retail pharmacy long enough that some of the pills predated the 1969 moon landing. Sealed bottles, original containers, never opened. Diet pills under brand names nobody has spoken aloud in forty years. Barbiturates. A four-ingredient headache compound. Every one of them was at least twenty-eight years past the date stamped on the label, which meant that under every rule governing American pharmacy, they were garbage. Lee Cantrell, who helps run the California Poison Control System, looked at the box and saw an experiment nobody could afford to run on purpose. He called Roy Gerona at the University of California, San Francisco, a chemist who had grown up in the Philippines watching people take outdated medicine and get better anyway. Gerona ran the contents through liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry. The results were published in the Archives of Internal Medicine on October 8, 2012, under a title that gives away nothing: “Stability of Active Ingredients in Long-Expired Prescription Medications.”

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One Thirty Over Eighty: How America Lowered the Hypertension Line While Europe Held Steady

A single edit to a single table turned tens of millions of healthy Americans into patients overnight. The question is whether the line was drawn for them or for the people who bill them. In November of 2017, the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association released a clinical guideline that ran to roughly four hundred and eighty pages, and somewhere in the front matter they moved a single number. The threshold for diagnosing high blood pressure fell from 140/90 to 130/80. Nobody’s artery changed that day. No chest tightened, no vessel narrowed, no symptom appeared. And yet, by the arithmetic of that one revision, about thirty-one million Americans who had been healthy the previous evening were now classified as having a chronic cardiovascular disease. National prevalence of hypertension climbed from near thirty-two percent of adults to near forty-six percent between one edition of a document and the next, and among adults under forty-five the rate more than doubled. Nothing about the population’s arteries had changed; only the boundary of the word had moved.

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On Being Ill with Wellness: The New Uninsured Insured

There’s nothing quite like having great insurance only to find out your insurance coverage — for reasons still unknown — is no longer as great as it used to be a few years ago. Is that result the rubbing off of Obamacare on established health insurance plans that have now been debrided down to an even more lowest common denominator, or is something else stinking afoot?

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The Medication Generation: Searching for Perfection and Enlightenment

As I’ve written before, having a blog of a sustained length over time that can dive back a decade with in situ thoughts and facts-of-mind on the record makes for a wonderful repository that allows a certain grabbing back into what we thought we knew then in order to compare it against the modern treachery of The Now.

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Side Assaults and Medication Induced Nightmares

If you are on maintenance medication for depression or your heart or some other long-term illness, one thing you should always be aware of when taking a new medication is its effect on your dreams.  Your doctor may not care about your fruitful dream state, but you care because you must. Your dreams are the pathway to a prescient future.

Sometimes, the medicine-induced dream-influencing doesn’t happen for a few months, or the fitful sleep arrives in dribs and occasional drabs that leads to a dribbling memeing.  I discovered, through trial and error, and the momentary comparative experience, that Benicar, my blood pressure medication, was indicating horrific nightmares for many months.

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50 Years of Regret

My article on Seven Depressions yesterday brought an old friend back in touch who shared with me that he has been suffering from depression most of his adult life.  He appreciated the bluntness of the post that depressed people are sort of stuck in their lives traveling from one medication to another looking for the right mix of meds to help them build a bridge to start feeling average again.  Some never feel better.  Nobody finds a cure.

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Seven Depressions

We know most of my friends are still medicated and, the other day, I was concerned when I read an article claiming that most depressive people on daily maintenance medication will have seven major episodes over the arc of their lives.  The demarcation between depressive events was notched as major changes in medication.  Some of my young friends have had only a couple of events.  Some of my older friends are deeper into their modes of seven.

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