DermHelpCentral

Martin Skrell's Amazing Pharmacy

Recently, the 32 years old hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli bought Turing Pharmaceuticals and raised the price of the life-saving drug Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 per pill.  This ignited a s*** storm in the media; but strangely the same thing has been happening for the past few years with other drugs.  A comic strip in the Sunday, September 27^th NY Times is a great spoof.

Can't Swallow Pills

Age doesn’t really impact your ability to swallow a pill.  “A teenager or an adult can have just as many problems as a 5-year-old. It likely has to do with anxiety and the negative associations with swallowing a pill.

Many never outgrow the problem. Harris Interactive reported that 40 percent of American adults have difficulty swallowing pills, even though most have no problems with food or liquids.

There is help for you,  See this Full NY Times Article: September 22, 2015

 

"Chronic Kidney Disease" Can Be a Dubious Diagnosis.

Kidney function declines with age in almost everyone, and the proportion of people older than 70 with glomerular filtration rate (G.F.R.) readings below 60 approaches 50 percent, studies have found. As the older adult population grows, the prevalence may rise even higher.

Yet the proportion of older people who will ever reach kidney failure, and thus need dialysis or a transplant, remains very low. People don’t turn to dialysis until their G.F.R. sinks much further, to about 10. In the great majority of older adults, that will never happen.

 The lifetime risk of kidney failure in the United States is 3.6 percent for whites and 8 percent for African-Americans.  So, Why are we even thinking about this as a disease?  By using the same standards for everyone, “We’re labeling, medicalizing and victimizing a substantial fraction of the elderly population,

To read this excellent and important article, see: Chronic Kidney Disease Can Be Dubious Diagnosis by Paula Span in the September 15, 2015 NY Times.

What Not To Say To A Woman With No Hair

In a culture that associates women's hair with beauty, health and desirability, losing it can be a a momentous prospect. Women can experience hair loss for a variety of reasons: through medical issues, cancer treatment, the aging process or a surprisingly common condition called alopecia areata.

This is an essay written by a young woman who has had alopecia universalis for over 10 years. Carly Severn's article.

Vitiligo - A Personal Story

"I discovered the first spots three years ago. As the rest of me tanned in the early summer, they appeared on my fingers and wrists, patches of skin that remained stubbornly white. First just a few spots, then significantly more than a few. By August, it was as if God had Jackson Pollocked me."

This is the first paragraph of a personal narrative about Vitiligo that appeared in the September 4th, 2015 New York Times: Learning to Live with Vitiligo.

Also see:  Chantelle Brown-Young Causes Reflection on the Concepts of Impairment While Changing the Face of Beauty.