America has a drug problem but it’s probably not what you think. When we think of the drug abuse we often assume it is younger people who’re experimenting with opioids or illicit substances and became addicted. Less well known is how overly medicated seniors are with a variety of prescription and over-the-counter drugs for all manner of conditions.
Monday Links – 13 June 2022
- In addition to Obamacare’s “family glitch” there is also a “rural glitch.”
- Why don’t the Chinese use a highly effective mRNA vaccine as a booster? Because that would be tantamount to admitting that their homegrown Sinopharm vaccine was inferior.
- State of Virginia to foster kids: turn over your Social Security benefits or else.
- Improved prevention, screening and treatment has helped to avert 3.5 million cancer deaths in the US over the past 3 decades. However, the cancer death rate among Blacks is almost twice the rate for Whites.
- Cancer cure breakthrough: personalized treatment that relies on the patient’s DNA. HT: Tyler
Anxious, Depressed? There’s an App for that
Covid and the lockdowns increased self-reported cases of anxiety and depression but patients were unable to meet therapists face-to-face. All forms of telemedicine rose in 2020 and 2021 including psychotherapy. Covid jump started online and telephone-based metal health counseling. As a result, therapist and patient began connecting through apps.
Did Efforts to Protect the Elderly from Covid Cost the Lives of the Young?
Peter Coy writes:
the number of people ages 25 through 44 who died from all causes in the United States in 2021 was 52 percent higher than the number who died in an average year from 2015 to 2019,
whereas among seniors the increase was only 9 percent.
An NBER Working Paper by Casey Mulligan and Robert Arnott calls the elevated death toll among younger Americans “a historic, yet largely unacknowledged, health emergency.” It asks whether young adults suffered “collateral damage” from policies such as lockdowns that were meant to protect older people. They write:
All of this suggests that large and sustained changes in living habits designed to avoid a single virus had not only “economic” opportunity costs, but also cost a shockingly large number of young lives.