The wellness editor at the NYT wrote a thought-provoker linking to an article about the results of a study comparing gender roles and spouses’ feelings about housework between heterosexual and homosexual couples. I thought it was interesting and it’s something I’m going to think about, even though the BH and I are better than many couples I know about splitting the household work.
A detailed review of the Mental Health Parity movement, and the push to make health insurers cover mental illness on par with physical illness. No question where I fall on the larger question, but I’d be interested in reviewing any scientific discussion about the ways to show/prove/test for the existence of hormonal/biochemical mental illnesses such as “mere” anxiety and depression– which respond to medication, but which currently aren’t tested for in the bloodstream, or detectable (like bipolar, for example) on MRI or EEG.
There’s an interesting Op-Ed piece in the NYT by a wildlife biologist about the impact of buying local on the fall of the sparrow.
The NYT published an article about drug trials and the underreporting of negative and equivocal study results to the FDA and peer-approved journals, data which factors significantly into the FDA’s assessment of where a proposed drug falls along the risk/benefit spectrum. To me, it’s no surprise. Despite cladding their studies in impenetrable jargon and cloaking their data in statistical regressions so complicated that you need a new eyeglass prescription to parse the numbers, scientists are human. They need funding. Announcing some big positive find or advance is likely to be more reputation-making than another criticism without a solution. And drug companies have an obvious incentive to bury the data– if not out of conscious greed and malicious disregard for the health of drug consumers, than out of wishful thinking and the manipulation of study results and monday-morning quarterbacking of the factors underlying the negative study and its results. Drugs are big money. I just wish I didn’t need mine so much.
Finally, the sad facts are this: the FDA, like any other government agency, is underfunded and understaffed, relative to the importance of its regulatory mission. They rely on the drug companies to be honest and to disclose good and bad information. That alone, not accounting for a revolving door of researchers, study project managers and administrators between drug companies, the FDA, private and university labs, and medical practice, is enough to warrant my vigilance about the drugs that I take. I don’t necessarily think all drug companies are evil, or that every FDA researcher is negligent or corrupt. But I do think some of them are, and the rest are only human. So I’ll continue to be the geek who reads the entire set of warnings with each new prescription, and who re-reads them every time she gets a new pill to add to the older ones. And I’ll continue to be the geek who scans the Health and Science sections of the paper every Tuesday, even though I’d rather not worry about it. But rather doesn’t enter into it.
