Medications

Those searching for answers to the question " Is medical marijuana good medicine? " will find few in Dr. David Sack's Times Op-Ed article.   On the one hand, Sack concedes, "Marijuana can effectively treat neuropathic pain, and it has been shown to improve appetite and reduce nausea," an acknowledgment substantiating the plant's therapeutic utility. However, he later warns that cannabis' ability to provide relief for certain other conditions, such as lupus and anxiety, remains unproven.

As University of California patient care workers returned to the picket lines Wednesday, hospital administrators said they were gratified that so many others chose to come to work. More than three-quarters of union members who had been scheduled to work Tuesday did so, said Dianne Klein, spokeswoman for the UC office of the president. Hospital officials said they expected a similar turnout Wednesday. "The [union] leadership is engaged in this game of brinkmanship," Klein said.

Asthma sufferers have long relied on inhalers for relief from wheezing or coughing attacks. But as of Dec. 31, Primatene Mist -- the only available over-the-counter asthma inhaler -- was taken off shelves because of its adverse effect on the environment. Other inhalers are available, but these require a doctor's prescription. Some people with asthma aren't happy about the change, but lung doctors and asthma specialists agree that Primatene Mist wasn't the best option for patients anyway.

Los Angeles voters took regulation of the city's medical marijuana shops into their own hands Tuesday, embracing a ballot measure to sharply reduce the number of dispensaries in the city. But as in all things related to pot policy, the future of the new law is hazy. Under the measure, only 135 dispensaries - those that were operating before a failed moratorium in 2007 - will be allowed to stay open. But enforcement could prove a monumental challenge as backers of a rival measure threaten lawsuits and city lawyers begin the long process of identifying all of the city's dispensaries and bringing them into compliance.

My husband takes HCTZ and Monopril for his hypertension, and Vytorin to lower his cholesterol. Since starting the drugs, he's had trouble with impotence. He refuses to see a urologist but takes an herb called horny goat weed instead. What effect could this herb have on his other medications? Clinical data to support the effectiveness of horny goat weed ( Epimedium) for erectile dysfunction or low libido are limited. What's more, products being sold as horny goat weed vary tremendously.

Karen Smuland has always been an anxious person. But after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York's World Trade Center, she had her first panic attack and ended up in an emergency room, convinced that she was dying. The 48-year-old architect from Bend, Ore., was quickly diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. In the years since then, she has struggled to gain mastery over the condition through a mixture of therapy, medication and a lot of trial and error. She tried several medications before settling on the anti-anxiety drug Effexor, the only one that didn't give her troublesome side effects.

Experimental drug treatments promising to slow or reverse the progression of Alzheimer's disease will need to be assessed with a new and more subtle set of rules, a pair of FDA officials wrote this week. The resulting new guidelines, predict some researchers, should allow Alzheimer's drugs under development to travel a faster path to the U.S. market -- and to the more than 5 million Americans who need them. The new guidelines, issued to drug developers last month and outlined this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, reflect a growing shift among both physicians and researchers toward earlier detection and treatment of the memory-robbing disease.

Ever since the drug warfarin was discovered to be a highly effective anti-clotting agent as well as a good rat poison in the early 1950s, it has been the frontline weapon in preventing stroke among those with atrial fibrillation. But its growing use has always raised the specter of dangerously hard-to-stanch bleeding if someone taking it is wounded or bleeds internally from a fall or a car accident. Roughly six decades after its introduction, Kcentra has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

The Food and Drug Administration is warning physicians that women who suffer migraine headaches and are pregnant or may become pregnant should not use the drugs valproate or valproic acid to prevent the severe headaches, in light of new evidence showing those taking the drugs during pregnancy have children with lower IQ scores than women who do not take them. That warning represents a strengthening of a boxed warning that already appears on these prescription medications, which are used to control epileptic seizures, to treat bipolar disorder, and to prevent and relieve migraine headaches.

A new study finds that one the fastest-growing classes of prescription drugs in the United States is linked to shrinkage in the brains of those who take it, raising some new questions about the widening use of antipsychotic medications .       Over a study period that spanned 14 years, 211 newly diagnosed schizophrenic patients had periodic brain scans that measured the volume of their brains overall, and of their brains' principal component...

SACRAMENTO - State Capitol politicians may have an extra $3.2 billion to play with. Or they may not. It depends on whose figures you believe: nonpartisan Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor's or contrarian Gov. Jerry Brown's. I tend to have more confidence in Taylor, suspecting that Brown may be lowballing it to be on the safe side so legislators won't try to overspend and plunge the state back into a deficit hole. That's noble. But it may not be looking at the world as it really is and making wise use of the revenue that taxpayers are generating.

The chief drawback of a law as complex as the Affordable Care Act, the health insurance reform measure passed in 2010, is that it provides self-interested opponents a multitude of places to stick a wedge in and hammer away. But you'd be hard-pressed to find a campaign against the ACA as narrow-minded and dishonest as the one mounted by medical device manufacturers. This industry, which encompasses makers of everything from tongue depressors to MRI machines, has been grousing from the outset about an excise tax of 2.3% the act imposes on sales of its products.

A strike by University of California patient care workers Tuesday caused the cancellation of hundreds of surgeries, the closure of laboratory stations and the diversion of emergency room patients, officials said. The hospitals prepared for the two-day strike by postponing elective surgeries and hiring temporary workers, but services still were affected after thousands of employees took to the picket line at the medical centers in Los Angeles, Irvine, San Diego, San Francisco and Sacramento, where the UC Davis facility is located.

When the national healthcare law takes full effect next year, millions of Americans risk disrupted health coverage because of common life events: getting married or divorced, having children or taking on a second job. As their family incomes change, so too will their eligibility for public insurance programs. And if nothing is done, policymakers warn, many low-income patients will lose access to their doctors and medications during this massive game of health coverage pingpong. Policymakers and healthcare industry leaders across the nation are paying close attention to the issue and working to close the coverage gaps before Jan. 1, said Alan Weil, executive director of the National Academy for State Health Policy.

A breakthrough in stem cell research has again raised the specter of human cloning. The discovery by a team at Oregon Health and Science University moves the world incrementally closer to that result, but its more immediate effect will be to spur efforts to regenerate healthy tissue for the injured and the ailing. Although it's reasonable to worry about where such a discovery may lead, those concerns shouldn't stop researchers from exploring the restorative properties of stem cells. The promise of stem cells is that they can develop into many different kinds of tissues rather than being locked into a specific cellular fate.

His wife was a patient at the clinic where I worked in my early days as a doctor. I saw her regularly for hypertension. But on one visit, she was more concerned about her husband - let's call him Pedro. He was having stomach pains and difficulty swallowing. I told her to make an appointment for him with me. When I saw him, Pedro explained that he had lost weight and was having trouble swallowing solid food. A barium swallow study confirmed my fears: He had esophageal cancer. Another doctor at the clinic received the report before I saw Pedro again and made an urgent referral to surgery.

The more medications men take, the worse their erectile dysfunction may be, a study finds. The British Journal of Urology reports Tuesday that men who take multiple medications may be increasing their risk for erectile dysfunction. Although some of the conditions they're being treated for might carry an ED risk, the medication on its own may also increase the danger of erectile problems. Researchers from Kaiser Permanente surveyed 37,712 men who were part of the California Men's Health Study about their health and current medications.

Some drugs are so common that consumers -- at their peril -- don't think twice about them. But each drug, whether prescription or over-the-counter, poses risks. To highlight these risks, we offer up a few details on five of the most-prescribed medications, with additional input from pharmacists interviewed for this package of stories. Hydrocodone with acetaminophen Brand names: Vicodin, Lortab Description: A combination of a narcotic ( hydrocodone ) with a non-narcotic ( acetaminophen )

Zack Greinke returned to the Dodgers' rotation this week, recovering from surgery on his left shoulder in five weeks, three ahead of schedule. Hanley Ramirez came back last month from a broken thumb two weeks earlier than expected. But head trainer Sue Falsone has little time to celebrate how cutting-edge procedures and rehabilitation methods accelerated Ramirez's and Greinke's recoveries. The Dodgers are in last place not only in the standings, but also in injury prevention.

SACRAMENTO - Facing a possible two-day strike next week by patient care and technical workers, the five large University of California medical centers are starting to cancel elective surgeries that had been scheduled as soon as Monday, officials said. Emergency care will not be shut and patients already in the five hospitals across the state will continue to receive care. But many elective procedures will delayed until after the potential strike, set for Tuesday and Wednesday, according to John Stobo, UC's senior vice president for health sciences and services.