Stephan: Here is the latest on research on placebo response, and the psychophysical reality it shows us about ourselves.
Placebo pills
Credit: Shutterstock
Harvard medicine professor Ted Kaptchuk is at the bleeding edge of a radical new treatment in medicine: giving patients pills that don’t work.
“Our patients tell us it’s nuts,” he says. “The doctors think it’s nuts. And we just do it. And we’ve been getting good results.”
In medicine, placebo pills are typically used as a tool to test the effectiveness of real drugs. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial, which researchers consider the gold standard for testing a drug’s effects, patients (and the doctors running the trial) don’t know who’s taking the real drug and who’s taking the placebo.
Kaptchuk has a twist on this: His own randomized controlled trials found that giving patients open-label placebos — sugar pills that the doctors admit are sugar pills — improved symptoms of certain chronic conditions that are among the hardest for doctors to treat, including irritable bowel syndrome and lower back pain. And he wonders if chronic fatigue — a hard-to-define, hard-to-treat, but still debilitating condition — will be a good […]
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, - WJLA (Washington, D.C.)/Associated Press
Stephan: You have probably seen the stories accusing Bernie Sander's wife of fraud. As it turns out it is just another piece of Republican disinformation sleaze.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., right, and his wife Jane, left, hug as they walk through downtown in Philadelphia, Thursday, July 28, 2016, during the final day of the Democratic National Convention.
Credit: AP/John Minchillo
MONTPELIER, VERMONT — A Republican lawyer who reported independent U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and his wife to federal officials was passing on information he heard from a GOP lawmaker who said he didn’t have direct knowledge of the allegations.
The lawyer, Brady Toensing, sent letters to the U.S. attorney for Vermont and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. alleging that Sen. Sanders pressured a bank to approve a loan to a now-closed college run by Sanders’ wife.
The source of that information was Republican State Rep. Don Turner, the minority leader of the Vermont House.
Turner told WCAX-TV that friends at the bank described pressure from Sanders’ office, but he says those friends didn’t have direct knowledge of the negotiations. Turner says he told Toensing about it in May 2016, adding that he would not have brought it to the attention of federal […]
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JULIA LURIE, Reporter - Mother Jones
Stephan: I have recently written a research paper on the opioid epidemic, and will publish it in SR when it comes out in Explore. However this is the takeaway: 20.5 million Americans 12 or older had a substance-use disorder. In 2015 the population of the U.S. was 320 million; that’s 6% of the population. It always helps to have a sense of scale, so consider this: that’s more than all the Mormons, Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus in the United States collectively.
The opioid crisis we now face, was created by the illness profit system before our eyes within the working lifetime of a single physician, and it has all been entirely legal.
Credit: Mother Jones
Long before the social workers showed up in his living room this March, Matt McLaughlin, a 16-year-old with diabetes, had taken to a wearying evening routine: trying to scrounge up enough spare change for food while his mom, Kelly, went to a neighbor’s house to use heroin. On a good night, the bookish high school junior would walk through his neighborhood in Andover, Ohio, a Rust Belt town surrounded by fields and trailer parks, to pick up frozen pizza from the Family Dollar. On a bad night, he’d play video games to distract himself from his grumbling stomach and dipping blood sugar, and wait for Kelly to return with glazed eyes.
It wasn’t always this way. When Matt was little, Kelly was a Head Start caseworker who patiently taught parents how to manage their autistic children. She loved hosting potlucks with friends and playing Barbie with Matt’s sister, Brianna. There was always music: Tchaikovsky when Kelly was at the piano, or Jimmy Buffett blasting through the speakers while she […]
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Matt Tait, CEO and founder of Capital Alpha Security - Lawfare
Stephan: This extraordinary story is the final thing that has convinced me the Trump campaign connived with Russian intelligence to influence the election through Russian sourced data used explicitly in a very sophisticated campaign to make Donald Trump the winner, and that he knew about it.
In the age of Republicans such as Everett Dirksen, Barry Goldwater, and Nelson Rockefeller, this would long ago have been called out. But in this congress such integrity and courage seems absent.
View of the Kremlin from the Bolshoy Kammeny Bridge
Credit: Alexander Gusev
I read the Wall Street Journal’s article yesterday on attempts by a GOP operative to recover missing Hillary Clinton emails with more than usual interest. I was involved in the events that reporter Shane Harris described, and I was an unnamed source for the initial story. What’s more, I was named in, and provided the documents to Harris that formed the basis of, this evening’s follow-up story, which reported that “A longtime Republican activist who led an operation hoping to obtain Hillary Clinton emails from hackers listed senior members of the Trump campaign, including some who now serve as top aides in the White House, in a recruitment document for his effort”:
Officials identified in the document include Steve Bannon, now chief strategist for President Donald Trump; Kellyanne Conway, former campaign manager and now White House counselor; Sam Clovis, a policy adviser to the Trump campaign and now a senior adviser at the Agriculture […]
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Michael Corcoran, - truthout
Stephan: I think this is an early data point in a trend with a good outcome. On the basis of data, as all SR readers know, single payer, not for profit, social structures like Medicare -- single payer health care -- will radically transform America in a highly positive way; and it will be much cheaper.
Now is the leverage point. If you can do anything to lean towards single payer, by word, choice, or thought please do so.
Health care activists gather outside Trump Tower to “declare healthcare a human right,” January 13, 2017, in New York City.
Credit: Drew Angerer
It has become fashionable to write premature obituaries of the Senate bill to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act, using hyperbolic and misleading language. The Senate bill, according to varying headlines, is “in peril,” on “life support” and “dead on arrival.” These stories should be of little comfort given that the exact same headlines were published prior to the House passing its version of the repeal. That bill was also reportedly “on the verge of collapse,” “in tatters,” “flailing” and even “dead.”
Such sentiment could give Americans a false sense of complacency. There is still a real danger that this contemptible bill, which according to the Congressional Budget Office would lead to 22 million Americans becoming uninsured, will still become law. Considering this, stopping […]
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