Yay, I guess

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Pills-by-Sarah-MacMillan-Creative-Commons

So as women living alone age, we’re going to drug them up because it’s cheaper than providing support services and higher Social Security payments?

According to a new study, women experiencing difficulty with time management, attention, organization, memory, and problem solving – often referred to as executive functions – related to menopause may find improvement with a drug already being used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The study led by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania is the first to show that lisdexamfetamine (LDX) improved subjective and objective measures of cognitive decline commonly experienced in menopausal women. Results of the study are published online today in the journal Psychopharmacology.

“Reports of cognitive decline, particularly in executive functions, are widespread among menopausal women,” said lead author, C. Neill Epperson, MD, professor of Psychiatry and Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and director of the Penn Center for Women’s Behavioral Wellness. “There are approximately 90 million post-menopausal women living in the US alone, and with the average age of onset occurring at 52, the great majority of those women will live in the postmenopausal state for at least one-third of their lives. Therefore, promoting healthy cognitive aging among menopausal women should be a major public health goal.”

TPP gives Big Pharma even more power

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

It’s very important that you call today. Don’t put it off!

As the Obama administration praises the benefits of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), backlash continues to grow against the deal. WikiLeaks has just published another section of the secret text — this one about public healthcare and the pharmaceutical industry. Newly revealed details of the draft show the TPP would give major pharmaceutical companies more power over public access to medicine, and weaken public healthcare programs. The leaked draft also suggests the TPP would prevent Congress from passing reforms to lower drug costs. One of the practices that would be allowed is known as “Evergreening.” It lets drug companies extend the life of a patent by slightly modifying their product and then getting a new patent. We speak to Peter Maybarduk of Public Citizen and John Sifton of Human Rights Watch about their concerns.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Welcome to all our listeners and viewers around the country and around the world. House Republicans are set to push for a vote as soon as Friday on approving a measure to give President Obama fast-track authority to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal. The secretive TPP deal involves 12 countries and nearly 40 percent of the global economy. On Wednesday, WikiLeaks released a leaked draft of another chapter of the secret negotiating text. This time the TPP’s so-called “Healthcare Annex.” Newly revealed details of the draft show the TPP would give major pharmaceutical companies more power over public access to medicine, and weaken public healthcare programs. The leaked draft also suggests the TPP would prevent Congress from passing reforms to lower drug costs. One of the practices that would be allowed is known as “evergreening.” It lets drug companies extend the life of a patent by slightly modifying their product and then getting a new patent. This is a video explaining the practice, produced by Doctors Without Borders.

PRESENTER: Evergreening. It sounds nice, doesn’t it? But evergreening is what drug companies do when they want to increase their profits. And it leads people in developing countries without the medicines they need. Here is how. A drug company develops a new drug and is rewarded with a patent. The patent stops other producers making the medicine for 20 years. So the drug company can charge very high prices without anyone else undercutting them, for 20 years. When the patent ends, other producers can come in and compete with each other, and bingo, the prices come tumbling down. So the medicines become affordable for everyone. But the drug companies want more profits, so they make a tiny little change to their drugs and ask for another 20 year patent.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, for more, we’re joined by two guests in Washington, D.C. Peter Maybarduk is Director of Public Citizen’s Global Access to Medicines Program. And John Sifton is an advocacy director with Human Rights Watch. Today he is hosting a briefing at the National Press Club on the Human Rights and Humanitarian Concerns about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, along with Oxfam America and the Council on Global Equality. We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Peter, let’s begin with you on this issue of drugs. Talk about the TPP, and for those who have never heard of it, explain its significance and, particularly, as it relates to global access to drugs.
Continue reading “TPP gives Big Pharma even more power” →

Call your congressperson

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

phone on fire

Alan Grayson says it’s very, very close in the House. Your calls make a difference. Please pick up the phone, call (202) 224-3121, ask for your Congressman, and register your disapproval. Say this: “Vote NO on Fast Track.”

A House Democrat on Wednesday accused President Obama of losing touch with the real world, as his administration pushes for fast-track authority to finish a sweeping trade pact.

Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), who opposes the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership and legislation to help finalize it, said Obama lives “in a cloister” at the White House, while Sherman and his fellow lawmakers “are out seeing the real world.”

“We’re in our districts. We don’t live in a cloister where the only people who can get in are the captains of industry and the titans of Wall Street,” he said. “We’re the ones that are standing at the county fairs, talking to whoever wants to come up and talk to us.”

Sherman said living in the White House for the last six years had put Obama out of touch with the common American and that he should listen to the perspective of fellow Democrats who oppose him on trade.

“The president should trust us, his 200 most fervent supporters who, unlike him, have a chance to get out and see the real world,” he said. “We have the same values, but we don’t have the same lifestyle.”

Obama and congressional Democrats have clashed for months over the trade pact, with the fight coming to a head in the push to pass fast-track legislation that would allow Obama to finalize terms of the 12-nation agreement by limiting Congress to an up-or-down vote.

Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) said it was up to Democrats to defeat the bill and “save President Obama from his advisers.”

With a vote set for Friday that would send the fast-track legislation to the president, House Democrats in opposition are still trying to rally support to block it. Critics of the deal gathered outside the Capitol Wednesday to reiterate their opposition and urge Democrats to hold firm and block the bill.

Dream telepathy research

~ susie

https://youtu.be/GbHQDHaM6eo

I’ve experienced this too much myself for me to even question it. But not everyone has the same experience:

Filmmaker in Residence Ronni Thomas–director of The Midnight Archive–introduces the newest episode of his Morbid Anatomy Museum Presents film series. Entitled “Transmitting Thought: The Maimonides Dream Lab,” this short film introduces us to psychologist Dr. Stanley Krippner’s provocative explorations of telepathic sensitivity and the dream state undertaken in 1960s Brooklyn.

It is easy to subscribe to a set of rules when those rules are set by science rather than religion. But science lives with a bias — that in order for an idea to be explored it must be observable, measurable and repeatable. Yet the irrational is part of our world, especially when it comes to the subject of human consciousness. Current scientific thinking brings an almost religious devotion to debunking anything that appears “irrational” or outside the rules and norms of core science.

But such an approach leaves tremendous gaps in our understanding — especially in questions of ESP, precognition, and other queries into non-physical intelligence. But this was not always the case. For a brief time, from roughly the 1930s to the 1960s, the field of academic parapsychology flourished in the United States. And at the forefront of the field was the American psychologist Dr. Stanley Krippner. In this film, Krippner discusses his research at the Maimonides Dream Lab in Brooklyn, NY in the 1960s. There, he and his colleagues conducted studies that explored the use of telepathy within the altered state of dreaming.

Through numerous experiments, including one with the rock band The Grateful Dead, the Maimonides team produced substantial scientific research on the topic of ‘dream telepathy,’ until the demise of the lab’s funding. Learn what we know — and what we lost — in Transmitting Thought : the Maimonides Dream Lab.