In the latest legal twist on the military’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy, a San Francisco federal appeals court reinstated the law but ordered the government not to investigate, penalize or discharge any soldier who is openly gay.

It’s another curve in the military’s path toward rescinding the 1993 law that barred military service by gays and lesbians who disclose their sexual orientation.

The Ninth U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco issued a ruling late Friday to restore the policy after the Department of Justice asked it to reconsider its July 6 ruling to end it immediately.

The three-member panel based its ruling on new information received in a declaration from Marine Major General Steven A. Hummer, who is leading the effort to repeal the policy. The government said ending the policy now would ‘undermine carefully crafted efforts’ to bring about an ‘orderly transition’ in the rule. Only one person has been discharged because of the policy in 2011.

While the court reinstated the policy, it barred the military from ‘investigating, penalizing, or discharging anyone from the military pursuant to the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy.’

Congress has already voted to repeal ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ But the repeal was due to take effect […]

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NEW YORK — Inhaling albuterol helps asthmatic lungs work better, but patients who get it don’t feel much better than those treated with a placebo inhaler or phony acupuncture, according to a U.S. study.

The results, which appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, demonstrate the importance of, literally, caring for patients and not just providing drugs, said co-author Ted Kaptchuk of Harvard Medical School.

The findings also demonstrate the impact of the so-called ‘placebo effect,’ or the phenomenon seen in clinical trials when people given inactive, fake ‘treatments,’ such as a sugar pill or saline, show improvements.

‘My honest opinion is that a lot of medicine is the doctor-patient relationship,’ Kaptchuk told Reuters Health.

‘A lot of doctors don’t know that, they think it’s their drugs. Our study demonstrates that the interaction between the two is actually a very strong component of healthcare.’

All of the 39 patients, each of whom had mild-to-moderate asthma, thought the placebos were just as effective as the real therapy.

Those who got albuterol reported a 50 percent improvement in symptoms. The ones who got phony albuterol said they improved by 50 percent as well, while those getting sham acupuncture had a subjective improvement rate of 46 percent.

The only […]

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At last, good news for the beta male.

From the wild to Wall Street, as everyone knows, the alpha male runs the show, enjoying power over other males and, as a field biologist might put it, the best access to mating opportunities.

The beta is No. 2 in the wolf pack or the baboon troop, not such a bad position. But conversationally, the term has become an almost derisive label for the nice guy, the good boy all grown up, the husband women look for after the fling with Russell Crowe.

It may now be time to take a step back from alpha worship. Field biologists, the people who gave the culture the alpha/beta trope in the first place, have found there can be a big downside to being No. 1.

Laurence R. Gesquiere, a research associate in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton, and colleagues report in the journal Science that in five troops of wild baboons in Kenya studied over nine years, alpha males showed very high stress levels, as high as those of the lowest-ranking males.

The stress, they suggested, was probably because of the demands of fighting off challengers and guarding access to fertile females. Beta males, who […]

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Japan’s leading business journal Toyo Keizai has published an article by Hokkaido Cancer Center director Nishio Masamichi, a radiation treatment specialist. The piece, entitled ‘The Problem of Radiation Exposure Countermeasures for the Fukushima Nuclear Accident: Concerns for the Present Situation

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Has America become a nation of psychotics? You would certainly think so, based on the explosion in the use of antipsychotic medications. In 2008, with over $14 billion in sales, antipsychotics became the single top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the United States, surpassing drugs used to treat high cholesterol and acid reflux.

Once upon a time, antipsychotics were reserved for a relatively small number of patients with hard-core psychiatric diagnoses – primarily schizophrenia and bipolar disorder – to treat such symptoms as delusions, hallucinations, or formal thought disorder. Today, it seems, everyone is taking antipsychotics. Parents are told that their unruly kids are in fact bipolar, and in need of anti-psychotics, while old people with dementia are dosed, in large numbers, with drugs once reserved largely for schizophrenics. Americans with symptoms ranging from chronic depression to anxiety to insomnia are now being prescribed anti-psychotics at rates that seem to indicate a national mass psychosis.

It is anything but a coincidence that the explosion in antipsychotic use coincides with the pharmaceutical industry’s development of a new class of medications known as ‘atypical antipsychotics.’ Beginning with Zyprexa, Risperdal, and Seroquel in the 1990s, followed by Abilify in the early 2000s, these drugs […]

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