Ramanisblog

Tag: Drugs

  • Many Dialysis Patients Undergoing PCI Receive Improper Medication, With Higher Risk of Bleeding

    ScienceDaily (Dec. 11, 2009) — Approximately 20 percent of dialysis patients undergoing a percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI; procedure such as angioplasty) are given an antithrombotic medication they should not receive, which may increase their risk for in-hospital bleeding, according to a study in the December 9 issue of JAMA.
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    “In the United States, medication errors are implicated in more than 100,000 deaths annually. Medication errors include adverse drug reactions related to inappropriately prescribed or administered drugs. To minimize inappropriate medication use, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guides pharmaceutical manufacturers and clinicians through drug labeling of which medications are contraindicated or not recommended for use in specific patient groups,” the authors write. “Little is known about the use of such medications and their effects on outcomes in clinical practice.”
    Thomas T. Tsai, M.D., M.Sc., of the Denver VA Medical Center and University of Colorado Denver, and colleagues examined the use of the contraindicated/not-recommended antithrombotic agents enoxaparin and eptifibatide among dialysis patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) and their association with outcomes. The researchers used data from the National Cardiovascular Data Registry (NCDR) from 829 U.S. hospitals on 22,778 dialysis patients who underwent PCI between Jan. 2004 and August 2008. The study focused on the outcomes of in-hospital bleeding and death.
    The researchers found that overall, 5,084 patients (22.3 percent) received a contraindicated antithrombotic medication; 2,375 (46.7 percent) received enoxaparin, 3,261 (64.1 percent) received eptifibatide, and 552 (10.9 percent) received both. In unadjusted analysis, patients who received contraindicated antithrombotics experienced higher rates of in-hospital major bleeding (5.6 percent vs. 2.9 percent) and death (6.5 percent vs. 3.9 percent). Further analysis indicated that receipt of contraindicated antithrombotics was significantly associated with increased in-hospital major bleeding, but no significant association was found with in-hospital death.
    “This study therefore demonstrates that these medications are used in clinical practice despite FDA-directed labeling, and their use is associated with adverse patient outcomes,” the authors write.
    “Educational efforts targeting clinicians who prescribe these medications and quality improvement interventions, such as amending clinical pathway order sets to include consideration of renal function, are urgently needed.”

  • Drinking coffee ‘will not sober you up’ when drunk

    Very useful information.When you take a stimulant with alcohol, the result will be bizarre.
    Reaching for a mug of coffee may be the worst thing you can do to try to sober up, a study suggests.
    Research on mice indicates the drink may make you feel that you are coming to your senses – but it is only an illusion.
    In fact, it makes it harder for people to realise they are under the influence of alcohol.
    The study, by Temple University in Philadelphia, appears in the journal Behavioural Neuroscience.
    Lead researcher Dr Thomas Gould said: “The myth about coffee’s sobering powers is particularly important to debunk because the co-use of caffeine and alcohol could actually lead to poor decisions with disastrous outcomes.
    “People who feel tired and intoxicated after consuming alcohol may be more likely to acknowledge that they are drunk.

    Despite the appeal of being able to stay up all night and drink, all evidence points to serious risks associated with caffeine-alcohol combinations

    “Conversely, people who have consumed both alcohol and caffeine may feel awake and competent enough to handle potentially-harmful situations, such as driving while intoxicated or placing themselves in dangerous social situations.”
    The researchers tested how well adult mice were able to navigate their way round a maze to avoid unpleasant stimuli, such as bright lights and loud noises.
    Nasty shocks
    The animals were given doses of alcohol and caffeine in various combination, and their performance on the maze was compared to others who were given a neutral saline solution.
    Alcohol made the animals more relaxed, but less able to avoid the unpleasant shocks.
    Animals given caffeine were little better at navigating around the maze, but were more alert and uptight.
    In combination alcohol and caffeine appeared to produce relatively alert, relaxed animals that were still incompetent at sidestepping nasty shocks.
    The researchers believe that in humans the combination is likely to make people feel that they are not drunk, when in fact they still are.
    The doses of caffeine given to the mice were up to the human equivalent of eight cups of coffee.
    Dr Gould said: “The bottom line is that, despite the appeal of being able to stay up all night and drink, all evidence points to serious risks associated with caffeine-alcohol combinations.”
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8403088.stm

  • Cigarettes kill, but don’t tell smokers?

    Doctor prescribed medicine to a patient, and advised him not to think of the monkey while taking the medicine.Patient could not take the medicine with out thinking about the monkey and eventually did not take the medicine at all.
    Never plant a suggestion openly when you are dealing with addicts, terminally ill patients and adolescents.
    Cigarette pack warnings that remind smokers of the fatal consequences of their habit may actually make them smoke more as a way to cope with the inevitability of death, according to researchers.

    http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5B83YO20091209?feedType=nl&feedName=usoddlyenough

  • American Youth in the 21st Century: Pathologized, Criminalized and Disposable.

    Issues raised are two.
    One is of racist discrimination and another is of disintegration society because of loss of Family values.In the garb of individual freedom,decency has been given a go by , moral values lost and family as the bedrock of Society is fast losing its grip.Drugs,Gun culture,free sex,living together,single parent, dumping parents in old age homes ,sexual disloyalty, loss of Faith and crass consumerism and materialism are the order of the day Unless this trend is arrested, there is no solution or salvation.Build solid family values, follow moral principles and give freedom of the individual a rest for some time.
    Story:
    Editor’s note: the following is an excerpt from Henry Giroux’ new book, Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability? (Palgrave MacMillan).

    Punishment and fear have replaced compassion and social responsibility as the most important modalities mediating the relationship of youth to the larger social order. Youth within the last two decades have come to be seen as a source of trouble rather than as a resource for investing in the future, and in the case of poor black and Hispanic youth are increasingly treated as either a disposable population, cannon fodder for barbaric wars abroad, or the source of most of society’s problems. Hence, young people now constitute a crisis that has less to do with improving the future than with denying it. As Larry Grossberg points out, “It has become common to think of kids as a threat to the existing social order and for kids to be blamed for the problems they experience. We slide from kids in trouble, kids have problems, and kids are threatened, to kids as trouble, kids as problems, and kids as threatening.” This was exemplified when the columnist Bob Herbert reported in the New York Times that “parts of New York City are like a police state for young men, women, and children who happen to be black or Hispanic. They are routinely stopped, searched, harassed, intimidated, humiliated and, in many cases, arrested for no good reason.” No longer “viewed as a privileged sign and embodiment of the future,” youth are now increasingly demonized by the popular media and derided by politicians looking for quick-fix solutions to crime and other social ills. While youth have always had to bear the misplaced fear and distrust of adults, how youth are represented, talked about, and treated has changed dramatically in the last two decades.

    Under the reign of neoliberal politics with its hyped-up social Darwinism and theater of cruelty, the popular demonization and “dangerousation” of the young now justifies responses to youth that were unthinkable 20 years ago, including criminalization and imprisonment, the prescription of psychotropic drugs, psychiatric confinement, and zero tolerance policies that model schools after prisons. School has become a model for a punishing society in which children who commit a rule violation as minor as a dress code infraction or slightly act out in class can be handcuffed, booked, and put in a jail cell. Racism, inequality, and poverty are on full display in the growing resegregation of public schools in the United States. Now more than ever, many schools either simply warehouse young black males or put them on the fast track to prison incarceration or a future of control under the criminal justice system. All across America, black and brown youth are being suspended or expelled at rates much higher than their white counterparts who commit similar behavioral infractions. For example, as Howard Witt writes in the Chicago Tribune, “In the average New Jersey public school, African-American students are almost 60 times as likely as white students to be expelled for serious disciplinary infractions. In Minnesota, black students are suspended 6 times as often as whites [and ] in Iowa, blacks make up just 5 percent of the statewide public school enrollment but account for 22 percent of the students who get suspended. . . . And on average across the nation, black students are suspended and expelled at nearly three times the rate of white students.” As schools become increasingly militarized, drug-sniffing dogs, metal detectors, and cameras have become common features in schools, and administrators appear more willing if not eager “to criminalize many school infractions, saddling tens of thousands of students with misdemeanor criminal records for offenses such as swearing[,] disrupting class,” or pushing another student. Trust and respect now give way to fear, disdain, and suspicion, creating an environment in which critical pedagogical practices wither, while pedagogies of surveillance and testing flourish. If young people were once defined as part of the vocabulary of innocence and compassion, they are now largely understood through the discourse of fear, guilt, and punishment.

    Clearly, there is more at stake under the current regime of neoliberal politics than an attack on children largely characterized by “negative labels and characterizations of youth [that] are falsely totalizing” and punitive laws and public policies. Youth have also become collateral damage for conservatives and neoliberal advocates who want to dismantle the social state and in doing so justify themselves by pointing to an alleged rise of a generation of disorderly and dangerous youth dependent upon government entitlements. Within this discourse, government support for young people is both undermined and inappropriately blamed for creating a generation of kids labeled as psychologically damaged, narcissistic, violent, and out of control. Scapegoating youth as both a generation of suspects and a threat to the social order allows conservatives and neoliberals to further privatize those public spheres that youth need, such as education and health care, while developing policies that move away from social investment to matters of punishment and containment. In this instance, the punishing state combines with the logic of the market to produce priorities and policies that disinvest in the future of children and assert a ruthlessness that largely treats them as reified commodities or disposable populations. Both childhood and the state are now being reimagined in ways that reveal the priorities of a society that has fully embraced the reckless abandon of casino capitalism, where the only rules that matter are made to order by powerful corporations and rich investors. How else to interpret neoliberal-inspired government programs that in the midst of deepening inequality, rising levels of poverty, catastrophic increases in failed mortgages, and growing unemployment invest more in prisons than in public and higher education?

    It is more necessary than ever to register youth as a theoretical, moral, and political center of concern, even as it is increasingly evident that youth are one of our lowest national priorities. It is crucial to connect the current crisis in democracy to the war against young people. Doing so will remind adults of their ethical and political responsibility to invest in youth as a symbol for not only securing a democratic future but also keeping alive those elements of civic imagination, culture, and education that subordinate economic principles to democratic values. The category of youth may be one of the most important referents for beginning a critical examination about the pernicious consequences of a society driven by market values, one that not only abstracts young people from the future but shapes the present in a theater of war in which youth become the most innocent victims. Youth provide a powerful touchstone for a critical discussion about the long-term consequences of neoliberal policies, which undermine any viable notion of justice, equality, and freedom, while also gesturing toward those conditions that make a democratic future possible. Many young people are part of social movements that not only address these crucial issues but also provide a politics, modes of resistance, and connective relations that adults should take seriously as part of their own civic and political formation at the beginning of the new millennium.
    http://www.alternet.org/politics/143875/american_youth_in_the_21st_century:_pathologized,_criminalized_and_disposable/?page=entire

  • Many pregnant women take drugs harmful to baby-Reuters.

    Pregnant women, please avoid drugs, at least during pregnancy.
    Story:
    NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – With the help of their doctors, women planning to become pregnant should take an inventory of the medications they take, researchers from Canada advise.

    In a study, they found that many pregnant women still take medications long known to cause birth defects.

    Some medications with known fetal risk, such as drugs that control epilepsy, are essential during pregnancy, Dr. Anick Berard, at the University of Montreal in Quebec, noted in an email correspondence to Reuters Health.

    Other medications, such as those that treat severe acne, anxiety and psychiatric drugs, antibiotics, and many drugs prescribed for heart disease and medical conditions, “can and should be avoided,” according to Berard.

    Women should understand the side effects of any drug they are taking — especially drugs treating a chronic condition — and plan pregnancies to avoid or minimize risks such drugs pose to babies, Berard added.
    http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSTRE5AQ3IS20091127?feedType=nl&feedName=ushealth1100