Recovery Michigan

Last May, federal authorities in Chicago broke open a sex-trafficking ring operating in plain sight. What they found was an operation involving hundreds of Thai women traveling from Bangkok to Chicago, since 2009, who ended up sex slaves. Many were forced to undergo cosmetic enhancements such as breast enlargement before they stepped on the plane. All owed tens of thousands of dollars for their travel and housing — financial shackles that would keep them ensnared in prostitution with little chance for freedom.

The international scope of the ring — women arriving in Chicago and then farmed out to other cities, like Dallas and Minneapolis — is not common in Cook County, the second-most populous county in the United States. Trafficking in the Chicagoland area mostly involves native-born women and is confined within the region. In Cook County and under Illinois law, any person under the age of 18 who is involved in the commercial sex trade is recognized as a trafficking victim.

What makes the Thai case even more unusual is how Tom Dart, the Cook County sheriff, approached the rescued prostitutes, all of whom federal authorities wanted to deport immediately.

“They’re victims,” Dart announced at the time. “We want to make sure the victims aren’t put in a worse place than they were in here.”

I'm skeptical, but we'll see......

https://goo.gl/evHPkr

Pharmacies would have new limits on filling opioid prescriptions for Medicare beneficiaries under regulations proposed Thursday by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

"We are proposing important new actions to reduce seniors' risk of being addicted to or overdoing it on opioids while still having access to important treatment options," said Demetrios Kouzoukas, CMS deputy administrator and director of the Center for Medicare, on a phone call with reporters. "We believe these actions will reduce the oversupply of opioids in our communities."

Under the proposal, Part D plans would implement so-called "hard formulary levels" at pharmacies which would restrict the amount of opioids that beneficiaries could receive. "These are triggers ... [that] can prompt conversations between physicians, patients, and plans about appropriate opioid use and prescribing," Kouzoukas said. "The trigger can only be overridden by the plan sponsor after efforts to consult with the prescribing physician." The safety level would be a 90 morphine-mg equivalent (MME) with a 7-day supply allowance.

The proposal also would limit the number of pills in an initial prescription for acute pain, "possibly with or without a daily dose maximum," he said, adding that CMS is accepting comments on the proposals through March 5. In addition, CMS "expects sponsors to implement 'soft' safety edits" to flag a potential problem, although those could be overridden by the pharmacist.

She asked about my preventive medication, and I told her it did seem to work, but I wasn’t in love with the side effects, including losing my hair, the inability to recall names from my short term memory, and that my skeleton, particularly my spine, felt broken. Constantly.

We made a plan to swap out my preventive. She asked whether I’d ever taken a particular drug. It sounded familiar, but I was sure I had not.

She jotted down the instructions for transitioning from one to the other, arranged for a referral to a neurologist, and I agreed to come back in a month to report how things were going.

When the night came to begin the new preventive drug, I did as instructed, reviewed the label as I filled my water glass from the fridge, pushed down on the cap, and turned to open.

Along with the cascade of tiny pellet-sized pills came a flood of memories.

Memories I pushed down.

Staying in a hospital is not easy on the senses. (I’ve written a little about this before.) Having spent time on hospital floors as a volunteer, designer and patient I’ve experienced many of the harsh sensations that impact people (patients, families and staff )— things like bad smells, loud sounds, and scary sights. These contribute to a more stressful and less healing hospital experience, and I know we can improve.

I was completely pumped to make my first post. I thought the group would be good for me — I’d have a place to chat with people in the know about coping strategies, learn how best to minimize any negative impact on my husband’s health during our daily activities, and have a place to share my frustrations if needed. Full of a perhaps naïve but genuine excitement, I posted, explaining our situation (“My husband was recently diagnosed, and now we’re in a wait-and-see period of MRIs every six months.”) and asking for help (“What can I do to make this easier for him and be sure I’m not triggering any anxiety or depression when we talk about it?”).

Her spouse apparently was in a wait-and-see period too. His diagnosis was all he ever thought about, and it was making her life hell, she said, because they never did anything fun anymore and lived in a black hole of brain tumor depression. She wished she had the money to divorce him. Well, I explained, I’m sorry about her issues, but I’m not looking to leave my husband — I just want advice on how to be the best support for him I can be.

She didn’t respond again, but it appeared that her willingness to bring in so much negativity sparked something in the other women in the group. I opened Facebook the next day to a flood of comments agreeing with her. These spouses told me it wasn’t worth it to stay, it’s more work than I could imagine, and don’t I want to move on to something else: that fairytale marriage with no problems that so many people dream of? I’d never get it if I stayed with him.

I was disgusted that so many wives were advocating for me to abandon my husband, when all I wanted was to both help him and find support of my own.

Meanwhile, my husband’s diagnosis expanded to include hyperacusis and tinnitus, which may or may not be caused by the tumors; we still don’t know. Relatively little research has been done on hyperacusis, which causes physical pain at certain sounds, volumes, and wavelengths. This was new territory for both of us. I decided I’d try another Facebook support group, just in case the first one was a weird vortex of negativity.

The first placebo-controlled study of ketamine’s effect on social anxiety disorder has provides more evidence that the anesthetic could be helpful in severe cases.

“Many patients with anxiety continue to have impairing symptoms despite the first-line talk therapy (cognitive behavioral therapy) and first-line medications (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors),” said study authors Jerome H. Taylor of the University of Pennsylvania and Michael H. Bloch of Yale University.

“Therefore, our research group thought it was important to find potential new treatments for anxiety. We chose to investigate ketamine because several studies have found it to be helpful for anxiety symptoms in treatment-resistant depression.”

A previous study on 12 adults with general anxiety disorder or social anxiety disorder, which was published in 2017, found that ketamine reduced their symptoms. But this study was not placebo-controlled.

The new double-blind, placebo-controlled trial tested the effects of intravenous ketamine on 18 adults with social anxiety disorder. Ketamine alleviated symptoms of social anxiety as measured by the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale but not as measured by the self-reported Visual Analogue Scale for Anxiety.

We give much attention to getting sober from drugs and alcohol but emotional sobriety is something that, in alcoholic or dysfunctional families, everyone loses. And everyone needs to get back.

Living with or growing up with addiction is a bit like inhaling second smoke. We inhale the thinking, feeling and behavior of the addict emotionally, psychologically and behaviorally; we take who they are while using, into our own inner world.

Many of the clients that I treat have never had a problem with substance abuse.

But they still act drunk.

They think in distorted ways and their emotions alternate between being overly intense or shut down, they have trouble regulating their inner world once they get triggered.

Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD for short, is a serious psychiatric disorder that sometimes occurs after someone has experienced a dangerous or threatening event. People with PTSD are prone to overreact to unexpected reminders of these events, and are often hypervigilant for danger. Why these symptoms occur is not yet clear, but it is thought that people with PTSD may have learning problems that lead them to overestimate the likelihood of danger.

Advanced tools from computer science and mathematics have helped scientists to study how the brain learns. These tools may now provide more insight into how diseases like PTSD disrupt learning. Scientists use computer models of learning to test how humans make choices and react to their outcomes. These models build on the idea that humans make choices based on what they predict an outcome will be, and then learn when they update their expectations based on the accuracy of their predictions.

Now, Brown et al. show that people with PTSD have an increased learning response to surprising events — these are defined in this study as outcomes that are inconsistent with participants’ predictions. In the experiments, 74 combat veterans who had experienced trauma in Iraq or Afghanistan underwent a type of brain scanning procedure, while they played a gambling-like game. Some participants had PTSD, others did not.

A new class of epilepsy medications based on an ingredient derived from marijuana could be available as soon as the second half of 2018 in the United States, pending Food and Drug Administration approval.

Officials from GW Pharmaceuticals, the company that developed the drug, on Wednesday announced promising results from a study on 171 patients randomized into treatment and placebo groups. Members of the group, ages 2 to 55, have a condition called Lennox-Gastaut syndrome and were suffering from seizures that were not being controlled by existing drugs. On average they had tried and discontinued six anti-seizure treatments and were experiencing 74 “drop” seizures per month. Drop seizures involve the entire body, trunk or head and often result in a fall or other type of injury.

The results, published in the Lancet, show that over a 14-week treatment period, 44 percent of patients taking the drug, called Epidiolex, saw a significant reduction in seizures, compared with 22 percent of the placebo group. Moreover, more of the patients who got the drug experienced a 50 percent or greater reduction in drop seizures.

Elizabeth Thiele, director of pediatric epilepsy at Massachusetts General Hospital and lead author of the study, said the results varied depending on the patient.