Bible in a Year
1 Kings 22:37-2 Kings 4:28
Determination destroys deterrents
Today's topics...
In 2000, Congress adopted .08 BAC as the national illegal limit for impaired driving link here In 1984, New York became the first state to require the use of seat belts by law. The law stated that the driver, as well as all front-seat passengers, must wear a seat belt at all times. Of the 37,133 people killed in motor vehicle crashes in 2017, 47% were not wearing seat belts. In 2017 alone, seat belts saved an estimated 14,955 lives and could have saved an additional 2,549 people if they had been wearing seat belts. link here Speeding endangers everyone on the road: In 2017, speeding killed 9,717 people, accounting for more than a quarter (26%) of all traffic fatalities that year. We all know the frustrations of modern life and juggling a busy schedule, but speed limits are put in place to protect all road users. Learn about the dangers of speeding and why faster doesn’t mean safer. link here Back Alley Abortions - link here Wednesday, January 8, 1964, former President Lyndon B. Johnson introduced the War on Poverty in response to a national poverty rate of around nineteen percent. The official poverty rate in 2017 was 12.3 percent, down 0.4 percentage points from 12.7 percent in 2016. This is the third consecutive annual decline in poverty. Since 2014, the poverty rate has fallen 2.5 percentage points, from 14.8 percent to 12.3 percent. link here As many as half the patients who were prescribed potent fentanyl painkillers designed for people battling cancer should not have received the drug from doctors, according to a study released Tuesday that sheds light on opioid oversight.Among the chief findings is that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and drug manufacturers failed to properly regulate the painkiller despite safeguards adopted eight years ago, according to the report. The findings are based on 4,877 pages of documents obtained by public records requests filed by researchers from Johns Hopkins and Yale universities.
Although the FDA has maintained a monitoring program since 2011 to track such medications, the study says the FDA and fentanyl makers did not take action when evidence arose about inappropriate prescriptions.
Drug manufacturers did not report a single instance in which a physician incorrectly prescribed the drug, the report says.
"The million-dollar question is, how on earth did such high rates of unsafe use occur when these products were subject to one of the most restrictive distribution systems that the FDA and manufacturers have?" said Caleb Alexander, a professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which helped lead the study. - link here Written by Allen Frances MD is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and former Chair at Duke University
It simply makes no sense that the antipsychotics are now the largest revenue producers among all classes of medicines — bringing in $15 billion per year — much of it coming from excessive use in vulnerable populations of children and the elderly. Antipsychotics often cause large weight gains increasing the risks of diabetes, heart disease, and shortened life expectancy. Almost equally concerning is that eleven percent of U.S. adults are taking an antidepressant medicine, making these the fourth most lucrative class for drug companies. Perversely, only a third of severely depressed people get the medicine they so desperately need, while many taking antidepressants do not need them at all and receive no more than placebo effect. And 4% of our kids are on stimulants for ADD, sometimes without a careful diagnostic workup and consideration of alternative approaches. A large secondary market has encouraged a third of college students to use stimulants for performance enhancement and/or recreation. We seem to be creating a brave new world in which everyone will take a psychiatric medicine, and some will take two or three or even more. - link here