Marijuana – What Does It Treat? “It does everything,” my colleague explained, shaking his head. “It treats pain. It treats headaches. It treats depression and anxiety. Epilepsy. They keep asking me for it, every day.” A novel antidepressant? An extraordinary new anti-anxiety agent? No, marijuana. My internist friend is bombarded with requests to […]
Driving Through Sleep (4/21/14)
Transport and Sleep Chance can kill you. So can sleepiness. People on the Metro-North commuter train into Manhattan were expecting a normal trip one morning last December. Until something “abnormal” occurred. At 7:20 AM, the train turned into a thirty mile an hour flying at 82 miles per hour. They were heading towards Spuyten […]
New Era for Alzheimer’s? (4/14/14)
New Days It’s not just in media, high tech and politics where hype often overwhelms hope. It also happens in medicine. The discovery of abnormalities in amyloid and tau proteins made researchers in the 1980s believe they had a handle on Alzheimer’s disease. A host of medications promised to stall or push back its manifestations. […]
Prevention Versus Cure (4/7/14)
Treatment, or Prevention? In a perfect world, prevention would not prove necessary. There would be cures for everything. In the American media world, this landscape seems to exist – or is promised soon. Suffering from schizophrenia? There’s a pill. High blood pressure? Multiple pills. Together they’ll surely work. Depression? Check. Where “personal will” no […]
Dying for Sleep (3/24/14)
Sleeplessness Can sleep loss kill brain cells? Yes. Like the kind when I pull an all-nighter for school or work? Yes – if you are a mouse. So why should I care? Because if similar events befall people, you may really want to protect your sleep time – or at least how long you stay […]