Tag Archive | Psychiatry
Fighting Two Addictions with One Pill?
By Rob Mitchum Since its approval by the FDA in 2006, varenicline has become a valuable aide for people trying to get over the hump of quitting smoking. Marketed as Chantix, the drug has joined buproprion and nicotine replacement therapy as popular options for helping smokers fight cravings and withdrawal as they try to kick […]
Thinking Outside the Black Box on Antidepressants
By Rob Mitchum In 2004, the Food and Drug Administration placed their equivalent of a scarlet letter on the antidepressant fluoxetine. Acting on the compiled results of several clinical trials, the FDA affixed its foreboding “black box warning” on to the drug best known as Prozac, preaching caution about increased suicide risk in children and […]
Breaking Ground on the Neuropsychiatric Data Mine
Biology used to be the scientific discipline where data was at a premium, a rare resource painstakingly collected in the field or the laboratory. But today’s biologists are confronted with a flood of data, a fire-hose torrent of genetic and clinical information that only builds with the spread of fast sequencing and electronic medical records. […]
Building a Better OCD Mouse
How do you know an animal model of a disease is really working? Researchers can create diseases such as cancer in a rat or mouse, but a tumor in a rodent may not behave the same way as a tumor in a human being. The challenge is even more difficult when scientists try to model […]
Linkage 8/12: Physicians of Tomorrow & Molecular Furniture
Medical school isn’t cheap. Today, medical students graduate with an average debt over $155,000, and the need to pay off those mortgage-sized loans drives many a young doctor away from more modestly compensated but sorely needed fields such as primary care and family medicine. To alleviate this financial pressure, many organizations have started scholarships to […]
Sexual Identity, Health, and Stigma in India
Last November, a barrier was broken in the prolific Bollywood film industry of India. A film called Dunno Y featured the first on-screen male-male kiss – a provocative scene in a country that only the year before repealed a law making homosexuality illegal. Many tagged the film as India’s version of Brokeback Mountain, a controversial […]
Medical Ethics Summer School
It has been a couple months since the end of the spring quarter, and the with it the end of many of the Medical Center’s weekly lecture series. But a recent batch of videos posted to the website of the MacLean Center for Medical Ethics brought a whiff of the school year to the dog […]
Genes Versus The Environment Inside
The odds of acquiring a disease are often portrayed as a tug of war between two foes: genes and environment. The battle is not always evenly matched. A disease such as cystic fibrosis is entirely genetic – if a child inherits the mutated CFTR gene from both parents, no environment will prevent the condition. On […]
The Stressful Truth Hidden Inside a Reverse Disparity
Over the year-long discussion of health disparities in the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics seminar series, the health gaps presented between American whites and blacks have been predominantly a one-way street. On nearly every health measure – from infant mortality to diabetes to cardiovascular disease – higher rates are observed for African-Americans. But there’s […]
The Genetics of Normal
In the 11 years since the blueprint of human life was decoded by the Human Genome Project, much of the focus has been on when those instructions fail. Scientists have used our newfound genetic knowledge to look for the roots of common and rare diseases, the gene or genes that can increase the risk of […]
