A recent analys if of primary care patients at Kaiser in Washington state, where recreational cannabis use is legal, found that addiction was common among patients who used it.
Moderate and severe cases were more prevalent among patients who reported recreational use.
The cross-sectional
study was 108,950 adult patients who completed routine cannabis screening from March 2019 to September 2019. Of those, 5,000 were selected for a confidential marijuana use survey using stratified random sampling for frequency of past-year use and race and ethnicity. Among 1,688 respondents, 1,463 reporting past 30-day cannabis use were included in the study.
The Indian Center for Theoretical Sciences is located in a rural area a few kilometers north of Bangalore, in southern India. Bangalore is a mid-sized city that saw a very big expansion in the past few years due to having become a center for the information technology in the country - with most of the big multinationals opening sections there. The rapid expansion increased the wealth of the middle class there (but remember, the middle class is the top 5% in India), but it also created stress to the traffic in the city, which is notoriously a plague there.
The campus of ICTS is very nice from an architectonic point of view, embedding nature in its buildings and trying to integrate the two realities. Below is a picture.
What if nearly everything that’s been written about this month’s Intergenerational Report is wrong?
I’ll explain. But first, here’s a sample of the headlines: “Young Australians at risk of a poorer future”, “Fewer workers to shoulder soaring income tax”, “Ageing population driving $140 billion blowout in spending”, and so on.
If you go to social media, you can see a lot of suspect claims about fad diets, unapproved medical devices, therapies, and conspiracy theories. Many of them have names with "Dr." attached.
How is the public to know a "Dr." may be a PhD or an EdD or an osteropath or someone else who didn't go to medical school and become an M.D.? How should physicians respond? From the years 1998 to 2021, coastal states in the US led America in vaccine denial, were doctors supposed to tell their patients they were stupid for believing vaccines cause autism?(1)
With rampant inflation, an economy whose only baffling bragging right is that it gained back 80 percent of the jobs lost since the Biden administration began, and mortgage rates increasing the most since Jimmy Carter was president, calls are on to subsidize more housing for the poor.
The world is in a tough spot with antibiotics. Because they came into use in 1928, to the public they seem like they should all be generic and cost a dollar. Yet due to expensive new regulations passed this century pharmaceutical companies don't have much interest in new ones.(1)
We're no longer surprised that so many people bow down to the
Invisible Hand of economics, worshipping its messenger coins and notes,
and attending its oracles, the Wall Street analysts. Adam Smith, the
18th-century originator of the invisible hand metaphor, took pains to
affirm its workings should be tempered by moral considerations and
should not be interpreted as the will of God. Those emphases have been
lost.
Chronic lyme disease does not exist, but if you say it does long enough, a scholar will begin to study it, and then others will cite 'emerging evidence', and journalists will 'teach the controversy', and soon enough doctors who don't want to get sued will sign off, no differently than California pediatricians gave wealthy parents vaccine exemptions to prevent autism during the first two decades of this century.
I recently read a book by Martin Rees, "On the future". I found it an agile small book packed full with wisdom and interesting considerations on what's in the plate for humanity in the coming decades, centuries, millennia, billions of years. And I agree with much of what he wrote in it, finding also coincidental views on topics I had built my own judgement independently in the past.
Half a decade ago, France's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) tried to fight for its credibility in the face of a scientific onslaught against their latest epidemiology findings by actually lowering the "risk" of something.
Like everyone else, when it was announced they were 'studying' it - in IARC, that only means mouse models that support claims of cancer and surveys that can be linked to cancer - I assumed they would finally do what they had wanted to do since the early 2000s; declare coffee a carcinogen.
And get $15,000 an hour expert witness contracts from lawyers who could then sue, claiming someone who cut the lawn and drank a cup of coffee got cancer due to the coffee.
