Negative Space: medicine
- Alcoholism and Medicine
- World War I helped further understanding that the effects of alcohol depended on how much was consumed, not what kind was consumed: men around the world came under the examination of doctors as they entered the military. This realization didn’t come quickly enough to save absinthe, however, and the drink fell mostly out of use in favor of other spirits.
- Cannabis as a Medicine
- Amazingly, as early as 1972 doctors were for all practical purposes prescribing marijuana to cancer patients as a matter of course; or, they left it to nurses to do so. By that same year, glaucoma patients had realized it helped them, too.
- Clinical and Biological Considerations
- Following the demise of prohibition, serious study of alcohol’s effects brought a greater understanding of how alcohol affects health and awareness.
- Don’t Get Jittery Over Caffeine
- Despite what you’ve read, coffee probably isn’t harmful in moderation. In fact, caffeine may be a useful drug. Denise Grady writes about the health statistics of caffeine and coffee consumption in Discover, July 1986, pp. 73-79.
- Drug Abuse: Prevention and Treatment Issues
- Without good science, prevention and treatment become haphazard programs with massive failure rates, partially because there’s no rational basis for even requiring treatment in some cases.
- Drug Action on the Nervous System
- From rational perspective to menace: tabloid science in Discover and Science magazines.
- The Epidemiology of Alcoholic Cirrhosis in Two Southwestern Indian Tribes
- S. J. Kunitz, J. E. Levy, C. L. Odoroff, and J. Bollinger discover that, just as for Europeans during alcohol prohibition, prohibition of alcohol in reservations does not reduce the dangers of alcohol.
- Lethargy, Leprosy, and Melancholia: Coffee and Medieval Medicine
- The attempts at prohibiting coffee strictly followed the pattern for other drugs: claim outrageous medical problems, and use it to harass unapproved groups.
- New Uses for the Old Hemp Plant
- Hemp has a history in folk remedies and occult histories, though to what end when combined with such drugs as belladonna it’s hard to imagine, especially when many of these formulas came not from witches but from the fearmongers who railed against them.
- The Once and Future Medicine
- Study after study shows marijuana as safe; survey after survey shows that some patients improve after using it and that doctors will recommend it. But even in 1993 we were willing to pay billions of dollars a year to keep prohibition going.
- Pathology (continued) Tolerance—Dependence—Withdrawal
- Tolerance—the ability of regular users to tolerate otherwise fatal doses— is “the only fundamental characteristic of opium intoxication that is generally conceded.”
- Pharmacology of South American Tobacco Use
- Nicotine is generally considered the main, if not only, drug in tobacco. It is a powerful chemical, with enough nicotine in the average cigar to kill two people. Topically, it can act as an analgesic.
- A Primer of Drug Action
- Robert M. Julien’s reference guide is both comprehensive and accessible, and continually updated. There’s not much here as far as history is concerned but it’s a treasure trove of information about drug effects.
- The Role Of Ethanol Abuse In The Etiology Of Heroin-Related Deaths
- A. J. Ruttenber, H. D. Kalter, and P. Santinga write in the Journal of Forensic Sciences Vol 35, No. 4, July 1990, pp 891-900.
- Tobacco Shamanism
- Tobacco use as part of shamanism appears to have followed horticulture, and tribes that relied on farming also recognized tobacco as a powerful insecticide. It is used both to rid plants of vermin and to cure humans of, for example, intestinal worms, a practice that Europeans also adopted.
- Treatment
- Even among all of the prejudices back then, there were still people who realized—and put into practice—that removing the external forces that drive the addict into a downward spiral can end that spiral. A lessened use of the drug follows.
- Weighing the Risks
- It is difficult to measure the toxicity of marijuana in humans, because no human has ever died from its use. Data from other animals indicates that it would take tens of thousands of doses at once to result in a “marijuana overdose”.
- Why does the EpiPen cost so much?
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With Mylan raising the cost of the EpiPen even as the EpiPen enters the public domain, people are complaining—but they’re complaining in ways that will raise health costs even more.
More Information
- Marihuana: The Forbidden Medicine•
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This is a fascinating combination of medical history and survey on the medical uses of marijuana. The descriptions by patients, especially cancer and glaucoma patients, of what happens when they lose access to marijuana are heart-breaking.
- Inventor Dean Kamen Says Healthcare Debate “Backward Looking”
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“Every drug that’s made is a gift from one generation to the next because, while it may be expensive now, it goes off patent and your kids will have it essentially for free… You can’t look at the problem and say, ‘I want them to do more, better, faster miracles—and not invest in research, not invest in development, and have those miracles delivered to me free.’ It’s unrealistic. And people know that about most things. They do. Nobody expects that just because they’ve made computers better they’re going to give them to you free.”
