A Small Step Towards An Artificial Pancreas

Patients with type 1 diabetes (T1D) are forced to spend much of their time obsessing about their blood sugar and insulin doses. The state of the art in treatment of T1D is an insulin pump that delivers insulin and a continuous glucose monitor that displays the glucose level and sounds alarms for values that are too low or too high. (See here for a refresher on the differences between type 1 and type 2 diabetes.) Currently, p...
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The Anti-Medication Bias

[The patient interactions in this post are amalgams of hundreds of patient encounters over my career. They are not accurate depictions of any encounter with any single patient.] “I don't like taking medicines.” All physicians hear some form of this opinion very frequently. Even more frequently, patients don't state this view outright but rely on it to completely subvert their doctor’s plans. When I was new to practice such an utterance would shock and confuse me. “I don't want to...
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Nearing a Cure for Hepatitis C

In the contest to get a creative name, few pathogens have done worse than hepatitis C. In the 1970s there were two known viruses that caused hepatitis – liver inflammation. You might have already guessed that these two viruses were called hepatitis A and hepatitis B. It was known at that time that people sometimes developed hepatitis after blood transfusions and that the majority of those patients tested negative for hepatitis A and B. A new pathogen was hypothesized and called non-A-non-B h...
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There Has Never Been a Better Time to Have Diabetes

The danger of diabetes is not only the immediate risk of very high blood sugar. Diabetes also has many dreaded long-term complications. (In this post I am referring to both type 1 and type 2 diabetes mellitus. For an explanation of the differences between these two very different diseases see the first half of this post.) Diabetes greatly increases the risk of stroke, heart attack, and amputation. In the US it is the leadin...
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The Scourge of Prescription Pain Medicine Abuse

Opioids are a family of pain medications chemically related to opium and heroin. They include morphine, fentanyl, codeine, hydromorphone and others. Opioids have unique properties that make them both indispensable for pain management and extremely dangerous. Unlike virtually any other family of medications, opioids have no maximum effective dose. If any dose, no matter how high, is ineffective at controlling pain, a higher dose can give more pain relief. Most other medications don’t work ...
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Tighter Restrictions Coming for Painkillers Like Vicodin

To understand this week’s story we first have to understand how habit-forming medicines are currently prescribed in the U.S. The Drug Enforcement Agency divides potentially addictive substances into different schedules. Schedule II controlled substances are prescription medicines that have a high potential for abuse and severe dependence. They include all the opiate (narcotic) pain medicines, like morphine, oxycodone, and fentanyl. These medications must be prescribed on a paper prescription...
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