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News, Insights & Opinions

There has been a lot of discussion in the media, and here on this blog, about opioid abuse in America, but the majority of the population’s pain is being treated with over the counter medications. The assumption is that these medications are safe to use because they are available without a prescription. However, this eye opening piece from The New York Times explains the risks and repercussions of our self-medicating culture.

The article details how non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen and naproxen can be used safely for treating acute pain problems — but that long-term use, a more is better mentality, and having certain health conditions while using these drugs — can all lead to adverse and sometimes dangerous effects. When taken long-term and in large doses for chronic pain, these drugs can cause liver and kidney damage, and when these medications are repeatedly taken on an empty stomach damage to the digestive tract can occur. This is an excellent reminder that all medications are the safest and most effective when used as directed.

Warding off illness is often associated with hand sanitizer and cleaning solution but this piece by The New York Times offers new thought on how your health could be improved by bringing a dog into your home. According to the article, researchers are in the early stages of discovering how living with pets may be positively impacting not just our mental well being but also our physical health. Scientists are finding that our pets — specifically dogs — are bringing a greater diversity to the microbiome inside our homes. By giving our bodies the chance to interact with a more diverse array of micro-organisms, scientists believe that we are boosting our immune systems and decreasing our chances of contracting some illnesses. Those muddy footprints tracked in by your dog may be annoying but they could also be good for your health!

Television, movies, and the 24-hour news cycle play on our fears of injury and death by sensationalizing events such a shark attacks, gun violence, and terrorist attacks, but what a lot of people may not know is that falls rank as the second leading cause of death by injury, just under car accidents. The most common setting for a fall isn’t at extreme heights or when we place ourselves in a perilous situations, falls happen most often in everyday settings.

Unlike car accidents or gun violence, falls don’t require any outside factors to occur, but just like other causes of injury, the impact of a fall can be life altering. Mosaic Magazine published an informative piece over the summer that examines how we can reduce falling injuries by learning the best way to react to all three stages of a fall: initiation, descent, and impact. What you do during these three stages can determine how severe your injuries will be. Additionally, the writer notes that the state of your health at the time of a fall weighs heavily on the outcome — this is why falling is so much more common and hazardous for the elderly and disabled. The article outlines the five main steps that anyone can take to prepare for and react to a fall in order to improve the outcome.

As developing countries like Ghana and South Africa grow their economies, the number of local fast food restaurants grows rapidly as well. Fast food chains find an ideal opportunity for new markets in the densely populated parts of countries where disposable incomes are on the rise. In large cities, fast food chains like KFC are still considered a novelty, but franchisees are eager to make eating at their restaurants a part of everyone’s routine.

A recent piece by The New York Times examines the history of fast food in developing countries like South Africa and Ghana, and the data presented in this article suggests that the change in diet there has led to the growing obesity rates. According to the article, because food shortages were a prevailing problem just 20-30 years ago, over-consumption and weight gain are a welcome alternative to hunger. The article goes on to explain that, unlike in the United States, there hasn’t been demand from the government or consumers to include nutritional info on the menus. Therefore, for many, this food isn’t seen as unhealthy. Developing countries are stuck in a tug of war between limiting the consumption of processed food and encouraging the growth and urbanization that leads to increases in the presence of fast food chains.

This fact-focused article by The New York Times puts emotion and politics aside to take a hard look at the numbers in order to provide an explanation for why mass shootings are so much more prevalent in America than other countries. Every potential explanation for America’s higher occurrence of mass shootings can be debunked by looking at other parts of the world except for one: America has an exponentially higher number of guns than any other country.

By examining all the hot button issues of the gun debate (gun control laws, mental health, cultural differences, etc.) through facts and comparing the U.S. to other countries, the numbers when viewed through this lens always lead to the same conclusion: the prevalence of American gun violence comes down to the prevalence of guns in America.

The United States healthcare and budget reform could result in reduced Medicaid funding to those in dire need: specifically, scaling down this funding could limit services that help the elderly, the poor, and the disabled live to their fullest potential.

This striking opinion piece from The New York Times delves into the painful history of people with disabilities in pre-war Germany and how the Nazis’ terrifying view of the disabled as “unfit” to live led to unimaginable suffering and death in that population. This piece is a difficult but necessary reminder of what people are capable of believing. The writer reminds us that acknowledging this history will help us avoid repeating mistakes.

This opinion piece from The New York Times concisely sums up two other blog posts that we have written recently regarding articles on the opioid crisis in America; as such the opinions detailed in this blog post are from the Times piece. Per the piece, pharmaceutical companies have spent the last three decades getting the public addicted to opioids and the outcome for them has been nothing but financial success. There is little that separates this method of operation from the tactics used by the drug dealers on the street. Pharmaceutical companies and drug dealers are both guaranteed steady business once their customers are hooked their product. The blame for the epidemic we see today has been placed on the users of these pain medications rather than the drug companies that provided the fuel for their addiction.

Increased discussion regarding the reality of this crisis as well as a growing number of articles shedding light on how it came to be may be a sign of a change in our way of thinking about opioid addiction.

With healthcare in the U.S. being the hot topic that it is right now, it’s tempting to look at what other countries are doing and what is working for them.

Different countries have different healthcare needs which can make it tricky to compare one to another. This clever piece by The New York Times takes a unique tournament style approach in an attempt to tackle the difficult task of comparing the state of healthcare in different parts of the world. The tournament is set up as an interactive bracket system for a selection of countries (Canada, Britain, Singapore, Germany, Switzerland, France, Australia, and the United States) so that you can play along on the way to discovering the “winner” according to the expert judges chosen by The Times. Spoiler alert: The U.S. didn’t come out on top in this game per The Times’ experts.

This piece by The New Yorker (a timely follow-up to last week’s post about prescription opioids) gives a look into how one of America’s wealthiest families, the Sacklers, accumulated much of their fortune through the development and success of prescription pain medication OxyContin.

The Sackler name is synonymous with their philanthropic contributions to the arts and can be found on plaques across the world, from the Guggenheim museum to a wing at the Louvre. But it is much harder to find this name associated with the family’s pharmaceutical business, Purdue Pharma. Since sales of this powerful drug started in the mid to late 1990s, America’s dependence on opioid pain medications has skyrocketed, and so has the number of deaths related to prescription opioid overdoses.