- 100,000 Americans Die Each Year from Prescription Drugs, While Pharma Companies Get Rich | | AlterNet — Daniela Perdomo: Your book includes some staggering stats. For example, 100,000 Americans die each year from prescription drugs — that’s 270 per day, or, as you put it, more than twice as many who are killed in car accidents each day. Could you elaborate on this? Are these people abusing their prescription drugs or is this a sign of prescription meds gone bad? — Melody Petersen: The study estimating that 100,000 Americans die each year from their prescriptions looked only at deaths from known side effects. That is, those deaths didn’t happen because the doctor made a mistake and prescribed the wrong drug, or the pharmacist made a mistake in filling the prescription, or the patient accidentally took too much. Unfortunately, thousands of patients die from such mistakes too, but this study looked only at deaths where our present medical system wouldn’t fault anyone. Tens of thousands of people are dying every year from drugs they took just as the doctor directed. This shows you how dangerous medications are.
- Stop Criticizing Your Mate!–Or, How to Learn What You Already Know | Psychology Today — The way relationships typically erode, however, is this. Once you’ve succeeded in endearing yourself to the person who’s become “the one” for you, you feel free–in fact, almost compelled–to bring up a whole host of (submerged) issues you have with them. So what originally seemed almost like unconditional acceptance (where else, by the way, did you think those “warm fuzzies” came from?!) now becomes increasingly conditional, as you begin to air out all your suppressed grievances. Once you’re confident about their commitment to you, it now feels like the right time to share exactly what you don’t much like, or appreciate, about them. Time to set about changing them in earnest. Time to improve them. Time to make them better fit your idealized pictures of the perfect mate–oblivious to the fact that you’re hardly the perfect (read, “unconditionally accepting”) mate yourself.
- New test may simply and rapidly detect Lyme disease — ScienceDaily — Lyme disease can be an underlying cause of what is mistook to be psychiatric illness. Proper diagnosis is very important.