Addiction and Pain Pain rots the soul. Opioids can effectively treat pain – and then rot the soul and body. The treatment of pain remains a difficult dilemna for the whole country. A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine highlights the opiod mess in a a new way, demonstrating how one prescription […]
Zee Drugs (8/18/14)
Zee Story The back of the alphabet is pushing for primacy. The masked avenger Zorro appeared in 1919; the remarkably popular Z cars television crime series transfixed Britain in the 1960s. Now is era of Z drugs. Zolpidem, zaleplon, and eszopiclone – respectively named for the commercially minded ambien, sonata and lunesta – are today’s […]
Rebound insomnia (1/13/12)
When You Can’t Stop Using Sleeping Pills You can’t sleep and you must. You start to take sleeping pills. They work – for a while. Then you find you need more. You try some nights without those pills. You can’t sleep at all – until you take the pills again. You’ve got rebound insomnia. Join […]
Booze and sleeping pills – the wrong combination (11/16/11)
Alcohol and Pills for Sleep “Beer and valium, that’s how I sleep. Works every time, a perfect night’s sleep.” So said an actor friend of mine, who often had trouble “coming down” after a play and used this cocktail three or four times a week. Yet often alcohol plus sleeping pills do not “work.” Thirty […]
Was Conrad Murray Michael Jackson’s “rest” doctor?
The Longest Rest June 25, 2009. I was rapidly scanning BBC News when I shouted “No” at the monitor and gasped before recognizing why. Michael Jackson was so young. How could he die? I gasped again when my webmaster told me CNN Headline news was calling Dr. Conrad Murray, Jackson’s personal physician at the time […]