Longer Looks: The Alzheimer’s Hypothesis; For-Profit Med Schools; And A Reporter’s Brain Cancer
Each week, KHN's Shefali Luthra finds interesting reads from around the Web.
The Atlantic:
Is The Alzheimer's "Amyloid Hypothesis" Wrong?
Last week, the pharmaceutical company Merck pulled the plug on a closely watched Alzheimer’s drug trial. The drug verubecestat, an outside committee concluded, had “virtually no chance” of benefit for patients with the disease.The failure of one drug is of course disappointing, but verubecestat is only the latest in a string of failed trials all attempting the same strategy to battle Alzheimer’s. That pattern of failure has provoked some rather public soul-searching about the basic hypothesis that has guided Alzheimer’s research for the past quarter century. (Zhang, 2/22)
Stat:
Their Med Schools Draw Ridicule. But These Doctors Want Respect
It’s easy to dismiss the for-profit medical schools that dot many a Caribbean island as scams, set up to woo unqualified students who rack up huge debts, drop out in staggering numbers, and — if they make it to graduation — end up with an all but worthless degree. That’s been the rap against them for years. But the schools are determined to change that image. Many are quietly churning out doctors who are eager to work in poor, rural, and underserved communities. Their graduates embrace primary care and family practice, in part because they’re often shut out of training slots for more lucrative specialties. (McFarling, 2/17)
Dallas Morning News:
Going Out Like Fireworks: A Reporter Investigates His Own Illness — Brain Cancer
Turns out a new understanding of an issue I'd not expected in medical for me. I have an issue in my brain. "Left temporal lobe." 4 times 4 cm at one side, it says. Yikes. I figured out when I had to get to the hospital when I got to the hospital. Issue I noticed in ability to see in one eye. Real, it turned out. Don't know full can get decided what treatment and issues may take for a day or two. I'll be in hospital, for some days, looked out. Looks like Marni will be in besting quality of issued. Some lovely relaxing medication interns a bit of challenge for me to understand details. This may interest less that clear is than I think and not make exactly what I'm trying to say. Sigh. Medication feels lovely. Did I mention? (Weiss, 2/22)
Stat:
A Bioethicist Embedded In A Harvard Lab Keeps Scientists In Check
Jeantine Lunshof insists she is not the “ethics police.” It says so on the door to her closet-sized office at Harvard. She doesn’t find reasons to reflexively shut down experiments. She doesn’t snoop around for deviations from ethical guidelines. But when scientists discuss their research in the twice-weekly lab meetings she attends, “I will say, hmm, that raises some good questions,” Lunshof said. There is no shortage of “good questions” for Lunshof, who for the last three years has been embedded in the synthetic biology lab of George Church, the visionary whose projects include trying to resurrect the wooly mammoth and to “write” a human genome from scratch. (Begley, 2/23)
The Atlantic/ProPublica:
When Evidence Says No, But Doctors Say Yes
First, listen to the story with the happy ending: At 61, the executive was in excellent health. His blood pressure was a bit high, but everything else looked good, and he exercised regularly. Then he had a scare. He went for a brisk post-lunch walk on a cool winter day, and his chest began to hurt. Back inside his office, he sat down, and the pain disappeared as quickly as it had come. (Epstein, 2/22)
The Atlantic:
The Promise Of 3-D Printing Prosthetics
He was barely a teenager when he was grabbed by a Sudanese guerrilla army and forced to become a child soldier. He was made to endure weeks of walking with so little food and water that some of his fellow captives died. Four more were killed one night in a wild-animal attack. Then the boys were given military training that involved “running up to ten kilometers in the heat and hiding” before being given guns and sent to fight “the Arabs”. (Birrell, 2/22)
Stat:
Can Minority Students Change Medicine’s Racial Imbalance?
Just 5 percent of US doctors are black, even though African-Americans account for 12 percent of the US population. Hispanics and Native Americans are even more underrepresented, research shows. That may mark more than a simple failure to diversify the ranks of medical professionals; it could also be bad for public health. Studies have repeatedly shown that underrepresented minorities are more likely to follow medical recommendations when their doctor looks like them. A diverse workforce also improves medical care for people who are traditionally underserved, including the elderly, those who live in rural areas, and minorities. (Weintraub, 2/23)
The New Yorker:
Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds
In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. The students were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake ones. (Kolbert, 2/20)
Vox:
The Psychiatrist Who Wrote The Guide To Personality Disorders Says Diagnosing Trump Is “Bullshit”
llen Frances is a psychiatrist who wrote the rules for diagnosing personality disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The DSM is the No. 1 tool mental health professionals have for making diagnoses. Frances, a professor emeritus at Duke, doesn’t mince words about what he thinks of mental health professionals who are now using the DSM to diagnose President Donald Trump with a mental disorder. “What’s going on is bullshit,” he says. (Resnick, 2/17)
The Atlantic:
Zoltan Istvan, Nick Bostrom, And The Anti-Aging Quest
“So, you don’t want to die?” I asked Zoltan Istvan, then the Transhumanist candidate for president, as we sat in the lobby of the University of Baltimore one day last fall. “No,” he said, assuredly. “Never.” Istvan, an atheist who physically resembles the pure-hearted hero of a Soviet children’s book, explained that his life is awesome. In the future, it will grow awesomer still, and he wants to be the one to decide when it ends. Defying aging was the point of his presidential campaign, the slogan of which could have been “Make Death Optional for Once.” To (literally) drive the point home, he circled the nation in the “Immortality Bus,” a brown bus spray-painted to look like a coffin. (Khazan, 2/18)
The Atlantic:
NYU Study Uses Remote TDCS For Fatigue In MS Patients
Laura Bennett, a 59-year-old pediatrician in Long Island, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1997, but her symptoms consisted mostly of numbness and tingling until about six years ago. That’s when she started to have trouble walking. She went from using a cane, to a walker, to a scooter. Her knee became so stiff that flexing it was “like trying to bend a lead pipe,” she said. These days, she can only leave her home with help or in a wheelchair. (Khazan, 2/22)