Shaw's Eco-Logic

This HND piece examines yet another curative property of Cannabis extract Cannabidiol (CBD).  Limited clinical data shows efficacy against the symptoms of type 2 and maybe even type 1 diabetes.  Apparently, its action here is related to the extract's anti-inflammatory properties. 

Making things even more interesting is that CBD also is said to promote better sleep.  We covered the sleep/type 2 diabetes connection in a recent posting.  Inasmuch as Cannabis has been used for medicinal purposes for thousands of years, it is most satisfying that an ancient remedy is now being taken seriously by medical science.

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This HND piece examines the role that sleep—espeically lack of sleep—may play in type 2 diabetes. There is plenty of research out there that supports this notion. And sadly, for many folks, there's not much they can do about improving their sleep.

Can we add put more hours into the day? Can we remove the stress and anxiety that affects nearly all of us from time to time? Indeed, can we prevent aging? Very few of my fellow Baby Boomers report regularly sleeping through the night.

What makes the sleep/type 2 connection even worse is that it is a vicious circle: Lack of sleep can cause type 2 diabetes, and type 2 diabetes can cause poor sleep. Great!

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This HND piece examines DTC advertising of drugs, which seems to be growing like mad, in light of the emergence of millions of aging Baby Boomers.

We describe the incongruity of happy-go-lucky commercial scenes acting as a backdrop to the recitation of dozens of alarming side effects. We also give a few examples of failed celebrity endorsements. Really...what could be better than a celeb shilling for a drug forced to carry the FDA's dreaded Black Box Warning?

Still, these ads work, big time—even if the proprietary drugs they tout are no better than the much less expensive generics.

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The worm, as they say, has turned. This HND piece describes how even a stodgy NGO has to face reality, sooner or later. The Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI), in a fairly blistering press release, has finally acknowledged that sterilization might be the only safe answer for processing endoscopes.

Although this has been suspected for years, in the wake of story after story of infection control issues and even deaths, an AAMI-led stakeholders meeting confirmed this, in pretty gory detail. Let's just say that everyone's worst fears were probably exceeded.

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