Viewpoints: AI May Be The Key To Diagnosing Rare Diseases; Standard Drug Tests Miss Fentanyl And More

The Washington Post: Can AI Solve Medical Mysteries? It's Worth Finding Out
It’s in the diagnosis of rare diseases — which afflict an estimated 30 million Americans and hundreds of millions of people worldwide — that AI could almost certainly make things better. “Doctors are very good at dealing with the common things,” says Isaac Kohane, chair of the department of biomedical informatics at Harvard Medical School. “But there are literally thousands of diseases that most clinicians will have never seen or even have ever heard of.” (Bina Venkataraman, 11/15)

Scientific American: To Treat Overdose Patients Now, Hospitals Must Test For More Kinds Of Drugs 
Hospitals link people to treatment in their time of greatest need. That includes drug overdoses, which now kill more than 100,000 people in the U.S. every year. However, the standard hospital urine drug tests often do not detect fentanyl, which today is the leading cause of fatal overdoses, or other “synthetic” substances. (Eric D. Wish, Amy Billing and Erin Artigiani, 11/15)

The New York Times: Safe Injection Sites Don’t Lead To More Crime, New Study Finds 
Over 100,000 Americans now die from drug overdoses annually. To combat this crisis in New York City and save lives, Mayor Bill de Blasio decided to support an initiative rife with controversy: In November 2021, his government allowed OnPoint, a nonprofit, to open two overdose prevention centers, where people with addictions can inject or smoke drugs like opioids and stimulants under medical supervision to reduce the risk of overdose death. (Maia Szalavitz, 11/16)

CNN: Fentanyl Is A Poison In The US-China Relationship
Fentanyl and other synthetic opioids kill tens of thousands of young Americans a year, and the compound is helping to poison the US relationship with China. It was one of the issues on the table as the two leaders of the world’s most powerful economies, Chinese leader Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden, met outside San Francisco on Wednesday. (Peter Bergen, 11/15)

The New York Times: With Covid, Is It Really Possible To Say We Went Too Far? 
In 2020, many Americans told themselves that all it would take to halt the pandemic was replacing the president and hitting the “science button.” In 2023, it looks like we’re telling ourselves the opposite: that if we were given the chance to run the pandemic again, it would have been better just to hit “abort” and give up. (David Wallace-Wells, 11/15)

Stat: How Depression Has Changed 30 Years After ‘Listening To Prozac’
In 1993, I published “Listening to Prozac,” a book that grew out of my clinical experience prescribing what was then a new class of medications, ones thought to moderate depression through their effect on the way that the brain handles the neurotransmitter serotonin. Some of my patients had reported marked favorable reactions to the drugs — first Prozac and, soon after, Zoloft. On medication, the patients were more confident, less anxious, and less pessimistic. (Peter D. Kramer, 11/16)

Stat: A Daunting Task: Navigating Dual Medicare, Medicaid Eligibility
Three months ago, my aunt Margaret had a stroke. Days before, she was repainting her bathroom and driving herself. Now, she needs help with dressing and getting in and out of bed, and our family is grappling with the fact that this fiercely self-sufficient woman will never live independently again. This health crisis has been compounded at every turn by failures of the health care system — failures that are particularly infuriating to me because I have devoted my life to solving these very problems. (Dawn Alley, 11/16)