Author's posts
Confusing correlation with causation: the most common error in science
The universe can be a very confusing place. Quite often, things will happen together or one-after-another that will cause even learned people to connect two events as causative when they are not. These misattributions are not just of academic concern. …
What the DEA does not understand or does not care about medication cessation decisions
Reports sent back to Washington during the Vietnam War made it clear to everyone. The U.S. was winning. There could be no debate or doubt. It was right there in the numbers. When searching for a metric to measure “success,” U.S. politicians…
AI enforcement in health care: Unpacking the DEA’s approach to the opioid epidemic
In 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions became convinced that the opioid crisis was not the fault of cartels smuggling fentanyl across porous American checkpoints. And it wasn’t due to pharmaceutical companies corrupting drug approval officials a…
Novel medications and genetic tests: a perfect storm for physician liability
The German pharmaceutical company Grunenthal has announced the start of a human addiction potential (HAP) trial of a first-in-class analgesic called cebranopadol, described as “less addictive” than previous medications. We’ve been dow…
What the media gets wrong when reporting on “overprescribing”
A recent article in the Macomb Daily reported that a “Shelby Township doctor was convicted last Thursday of all counts for conspiring to distribute more than 300,000 opioid prescription pills valued at over $6 million, following a trial in U.S. D…
Medical malpractice or miscarriage of justice? A doctor’s ordeal.
In 1999, Sally Clark was convicted of murder. Her son, Christopher, had been born in September of 1996 and by all accounts, had been a healthy baby. Just three months later, an ambulance was called to the home, and the baby was dead. The mother, Sally,…
How gene editing and immunotherapy are changing lives
When I started medical school thirty years ago, and learned about the discovery of streptomycin, I wondered what it must have been like for the doctors who first used it to cure the “white death.” How satisfying it must have been to tell a …
America’s pain management nightmare: How the DEA shaped the opioid epidemic
First, it’s essential to understand that your prosecution doesn’t define you as a person. Most likely, the DEA never bothered to speak with you before deciding to arrest and prosecute you. Even if they did, the decision to prosecute you had…
The dark role of science, medicine, and tasers
The sciences and even medicine have long been used to justify atrocities. In the early 1800s, the United States of America was a slave nation. Citizens were allowed to purchase and imprison other races and hold them in bondage as property. This is diff…
Lessons from historical drug prohibitions
New Zealand just rescinded its ban on tobacco smoking at the same time that Donald Trump just suggested the death penalty could cure the drug problem. What did New Zealand learn? And how has drug prohibition worked out in the past? In 1511, the governo…
