Longer Looks: A Pioneering Heart Surgeon; Psychedelic Drugs; Tech Addiction
Each week, KHN finds interesting reads from around the Web.
ProPublica:
A Pioneering Heart Surgeon’s Secret History Of Research
There’s a story Bud Frazier tells often. It was around 1966, and Frazier, now one of the world’s most celebrated heart surgeons, was a medical student at Baylor College of Medicine. An Italian teenager had come to Houston for an aortic valve replacement, but at some point during or after the surgery, the teen’s heart stopped. Doctors told Frazier to reach in and start pumping the failed organ by hand. As he did so, the teen lifted a hand to Frazier’s face, and in that moment, just before the patient died, he says he realized his life’s calling. (Ornstein and Hixenbaugh, 5/24)
Vox:
Why Psychedelic Drugs Could Transform How We Treat Depression And Mental Illness
The first time I tried ayahuasca, a plant concoction containing the natural hallucinogen DMT, I remember thinking: “Just let go. Whatever happens, just let go. ”Eventually, I did let go, and what followed was the most rewarding, and harrowing, experience of my life. I was forced to confront my own ego in a way I never had before, and I wasn’t quite prepared for what I saw. (Illing, 5/21)
Wired:
Congress Is About To Learn Just How Little Science Knows About Tech Addiction
questions Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced before members of Congress last month, you'd be forgiven for thinking some legislators had never so much as heard of the internet. (Pardon the snark, but South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham's "Is Twitter the same as what you do?" still gives us the vapors.) And yet, recent signs suggest America's lawmakers aren't completely clueless about the growing concern over tech giants and their influence. (Gonzalez, 5/23)
The Atlantic:
Can Genetic Counselors Keep Up With 23andMe?
In hindsight, clicking on the email from 23andMe at 10 p.m., alone, on a particularly cold March night probably wasn’t the best idea. Still, Nancy Wurtzel thought she was prepared for the genetic-testing company to give her the news that she had inherited the gene for late-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Both her parents died from it—her father at 86 and her mother at 92. But when Wurtzel stared at the blue glow of her computer screen announcing she had two copies of the ApoE4 variant and quoting her a 60-percent chance of developing Alzheimer’s by age 85, she panicked. “I could hardly catch my breath, and I felt like the floor was opening up. The reality hit me,” says Wurtzel, a 62-year-old public-relations consultant from Minneapolis. “I thought, ‘What do I do now?’” (Richards, 5/22)
The New York Times:
Trying To Put A Value On The Doctor-Patient Relationship
On October 2014, my father was startled to receive a letter announcing the retirement, in a month’s time, of our family physician. Both he and his doctor were in their late 60s by then, and their relationship went back about 30 years, to the early 1980s, after my father followed his father and paternal grandparents, all from the Midwest, to Southwest Florida. How they began seeing the doctor is beyond memory, but as my father’s grandparents grew increasingly frail, his father frequently drove them to their doctor for checkups. At one of them, in the mid-’80s, the doctor suggested that it might be less strenuous for my great-grandparents if he met them in the parking lot. From then until they died, he came downstairs from his seventh-floor office with his black bag and climbed into the back seat of their yellow Oldsmobile 88 to give them their physicals. (Tingley, 5/16)
The New York Times:
The Opioid That Made A Fortune For Its Maker — And For Its Prescribers
Selling drugs is a relationship business. It’s best to do it in person. That is why, on a summer evening in 2012, Alec Burlakoff was out for dinner with Steven Chun, the owner of Sarasota Pain Associates. Burlakoff was a sales manager for Insys Therapeutics, an Arizona-based pharmaceutical company with only one branded product, a new and highly potent opioid painkiller called Subsys. Chun was a doctor who prescribed a lot of opioids. (Evan Hughes, 5/2)
