Entries tagged with links

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Why Did the Harrowing Personal Essay Take Over the Internet?

“You’re not the wonderful writer who wrote this story and reported all of these things and made it into something that was pleasurable for people to read, even though it’s a serious topic. You are “lady victim of terrible man” now, and we’re the reporters who are reporting on your story.”

(Amanda Hess talking about the response to her Pacific Standard article, “Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet” on the Slate Double X Podcast 9/10/15

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Risk Factors for Prescription Painkiller Abuse and Overdose

Risk Factors for Prescription Painkiller Abuse and Overdose | Prescription Drug Overdose | CDC Injury Center

This summary really conflates poor healthcare and intentional non-medical use of opioids as risks for overdose. It is cheaper to sloppily prescribe opioids than to do proper pain management (including expensive and labor-intensive physical therapy) and this bears out in the increased risk of overdose for poor and/or rural patients.

I’m still trying to tease this data apart.

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CDC Grand Rounds: Prescription Drug Overdoses — a U.S. Epidemic

Among people who have a prescription for an opioid and then die of an opioid overdose. Basically, 10% of the people who have prescriptions look fishy because they have more than one doctor prescribing to them, and they disproportionately die of overdoses. It is worth pointing out that these patients may just have crappy healthcare. But the other 60% of the patients who die of opioid overdoses seemed to be taking the drugs as prescribed.

“Among patients who are prescribed opioids, an estimated 80% are prescribed low doses (<100 mg morphine equivalent dose per day) by a single practitioner, and these patients account for an estimated 20% of all prescription drug overdoses. Another 10% of patients are prescribed high doses (≥100 mg morphine equivalent dose per day) of opioids by single prescribers and account for an estimated 40% of prescription opioid overdoses. The remaining 10% of patients seek care from multiple doctors, are prescribed high daily doses, and account for another 40% of opioid overdoses.“

Other data estimates that half of all overdoses (including the non-fatal majority of overdose ER visits) are people who are prescribed opioids and half a people who have not opioid prescription of their own. Non-medical opioid users are overrepresented, but apparently not by a huge amount:

The two main populations in the United States at risk for prescription drug overdose are the approximately 9 million persons who report long-term medical use of opioids (5), and the roughly 5 million persons who report nonmedical use (i.e., use without a prescription or medical need), in the past month

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Drug-Related Emergency Department Visits

Highlights of the 2009 Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) Findings on Drug-Related Emergency Department Visits

I think that opioid overdoses from opioids that are used as prescribed are chronically underreported in the media , and now that I’m trying to dig up the data, it is actually really hard to find.

Note that this is emergency department visits, not deaths.

2009 is the most recent data I can find that breaks it down in the following way:

Adverse reactions to pain relievers: 296.9 visits per 100,000 population
Misuse of pain relievers: 194.0 visits per 100,000 population
Misuse of narcotic pain relievers: 129.4 visits per 100,000 population
Heroin overdose: 69.4 visits per 100,000 population

An adverse reaction is defined as a patient who is prescribed a drug and seems to be taking it as prescribed, and still ends up in the ER. I can’t find the adverse reactions to narcotic pain relievers pulled out as a separate category, but just looking at all pain relievers, 60% of ER visits are essentially misdosing problems of compliant patients.

Of course, many more people are prescribed opioids than use them non-medically or than use heroin, so non-medical opiate/opioid users are dispropotionately ending up in the ER.

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San Francisco AIDS Foundation

pozmagazine:

Remember the Bay Area Reporter’s scathing 59-page essay about the San Francisco AIDS Foundation earlier this year?
“Gay men get nice, clean, pretty facilities. Folks who use drugs, who may be brown, may live on the streets, may be dirty, like, good fucking luck if they’re gonna get thought about in however the agency moves forward.”
Welp, their CEO is now officially stepping down.

In the early 2000s, I volunteered at HIV Prevention Project which had been adopted by SFAF (needle exchanges were required to be affiliated with a larger nonprofit because of the way needle exchange and needle exchange funding were legalized in California in the early 90s). And there was a real feeling among the HPP staff that it was not a great fit, and that SFAF was focusing more on working on the global stage, and our program was running off the change they found in their sofa, if that.

We were also pretty pissed off when word came down from on high that we couldn’t make Fuck Safe Shoot Clean T-shirts for Pride. Instead we ended up with the much creepier slogan A Clean Needle, A Human Live. Yuck.

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More Brits Than Ever Are In Between on the Kinsey Scale, New Survey Shows

I have some questions about the survey methodology. Online polls are notoriously biased.

I would also be interested in a comparison of men and women. The 2006-2008 CDC data shows a big difference in both same-sex attraction and sexual activity between men and women, even among the 18-24 group. I’m also interested that YouGov got numbers that were so much higher than the CDC data.

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We’ve Been Cheated Out of Condoms That Actually Feel Good During Sex

Apparently, I didn’t already post this?

Interesting discussion of the efficacy of natural membrane vs latex condoms in real world situations.