Interesting take on Oxycontin story

Will be interested in "the rest of the story," once it's told.

Radden podcast

Anxiety: students-in-the-age-of-trump.

http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/10/26/559914440/teachers-report-stressed-anxious-students-in-the-age-of-trump

Opioid relapse: A crime?

Opioid relapse: should-it-be-a-crime?

Epidemiology for clinical neurologists

Recent review article:

 

Sackler and opioids

Worth reading URL

Don't believe everything you read.

Sociometry

G.A. Lundberg, 1941, URL

An interesting sociological perspective:

 

Balfour's Neuroepidemiology of 1845

Balfour JSTOR URL. Look for diseases of the brain in naval versus military (ground forces).

 

 

 

Healy and R code data visualization

Healy' online data visualization book with intro to R code

Why isn’t treatment for depression leading to lower prevalence?

Depression:

Tony Jorm:

His talk

Stigma: inherently disparaging?

From the Oxford English Dictionary online, with my annotation: stigma.

Prompted by a discussion with Ron Cox, who asks whether we want to remove or reduce social stigma attached to drug use before we have definitive evidence on the degree to which stigma now deters and reduces the incidence of drug use. The result might be an increased incidence rate.

He notes that an analogy might be found in "loving and aiding the sinner" but "hating the sin."

Would anyone like to add comments in a respectful and dignified social policy discussion -- i.e., one that respects and treats comments as we would like our comments to be treated in a university-based discussion of alternative points of view and hypotheses? Let's welcome an exchange.

Socrates might ask whether we can use this line of reasoning for other purposes -- e.g., to reduce health care costs and the federal government expenditures on mental health and neurological care care via an initiative to increase the stigma attached to (1) being a recipient of mental health care or (2) receiving neurological services such as a brain scan after a consciousness-affecting blow to the head during a college football game?

Or, if we cannot ban sales and purchases of pain relievers, can we try to attach more stigma to taking these compounds in order to achieve pain relief?

You can think of other analogies that Socrates might work up with respect to obesity, failing to earn a 4.0 GPA, getting free breakfast or lunch at school,....

Are there pre-emptive values that should be called into play?

How would you describe those values?

Where in the university curriculum for epidemiology and public health do we introduce, explore, and debate these values and their policy implications?

 

Emergence of drug development after Dalton's atomic theory

Professor Tom Ban just contributed a useful short essay on the background of neuropsychopharmacology, with some details that embellish what I've described in relation to Woods' first use of a syringe to inject morphine for pain relief and the emergence of drug development from the aniline dye industries.

Ban, 2017

For more on John Dalton, this 43 minute podcast is instructive: In Our Time

In Our Time

More from BBC:

Dyes

Why would someone like Perkin want to synthesize quinine?

Why do the people of Peru jealously guard their supply of quinoa?

From: Fred Skeberg, 2017:  https://medium.com/@matgalen/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-gin-and-tonic-82bde029b269

"What is Quinine

The story is that Spanish colonists discovered that the bark from the Quinquina tree in Peru could be used to treat Malaria. This likely happened in the early 1600’s. In Europe this ground bitter bark became known as Fever Tree bark or Jesuit’s powder. It is believed that the discovery and usage of the bark was one of the reasons why European countries managed to colonize the tropics.

The most active ingredient in the bark is quinine. In 1817 a couple of French scientists discovered a way to extract the quinine from the bark and from then on pure quinine powder became available to prevent the Malaria. It was this powder that was prescribed to the British officers which they created the first Tonic water with.

In the beginning most bark for quinine came from its original country of Peru. But seeds was smuggled out in 1860 and was sold to the Dutch government. They set up big plantations in Java, Indonesia where they could have full control of the market. During World War II the Japanese occupied Java which lead to a shortage in quinine. To prevent this from being a future problem trees was planted in Africa and synthetic quinine was developed.

Both the planting in Africa and the creation of synthetic quinine turned out successful and now there are quinine exported from Africa as well as synthetic quinine."