Photography A person’s lifetime medication consumption has a familiar and predictable pattern. The more a person ages, the greater their number of taken medication. However, the public behavior in initiating medication has been changed compared to thir…
Many drug ads in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s would offend today. In an ad for Valium, we are told that the woman pictured (“Jan”) is “psychoneurotic” because she is unmarried at age 35. “You…
The 20th century was an explosion of scientific innovation and discovery. The success of chemistry, physics and biology to produce things such as antibiotics, radiography and genetic analysis could not be ignored. Medicine is not now, nor has it ever b…
An installation to explore the impact of medications in daily life Bob is a typical patient at the pharmacy with a chronic illness. Bob, along with 30 other random patients whom I followed in the year 2017, had been picked up to explore the number of m…
“How dare you suggest I/my son is not sick?” “Stop invalidating the lived experiences of millions of people!” “Able-bodied people like you have no right to report this.” “How dare you suggest my medication has …
“Something’s wrong with Eddie.” In four words, my entire wedding day collapsed around me. I’d just arrived at a beautiful Gothic chapel in a rented 1950 Rolls Royce, mom and dad on either side of me, prepared for a picture-perfect first look with my g…
When the “opioid crisis” is mentioned, most people think of heroin, prescription pills like oxycodone, or — more recently — the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl. Fewer people would think of novel opioids like tianeptine, although an incre…
I look forward to clinic days. I thoroughly enjoy meeting with patients, hearing how they’re doing, and helping them to feel better – even if, on occasion, the only thing I can do to help is to listen. Yesterday was a clinic day. In the middle of…
Two weeks ago, my piece, “Cannabinoids are medicine, but patients aren’t getting the care they need,” was published. Since that time, I’ve heard from quite a few physicians who admitted that they did not know card-mills existed or, if they …
It was September 11, 2001. My dad had cheated on my mom again, the building that I worked in at that time had received an anonymous tip that we were a potential target for the terrorist attacks, and my mom, who needed a reprieve from my dad’s crap, was…
