Nationally Sindicated Fitness, Health, and Medicine Columnist
Late last Friday, an advisory panel to the US Food and Drug Administration voted – far from unanimously – to toughen restrictions on painkillers such as Vicodin, which contain the opioid hydrocodone. Typically, the FDA takes the advice of such advisory committees.
Bad, bad, bad move.
It was almost child’s play.
Using a computer, an Internet connection and information available publicly online, researchers from the Whitehead Institute at MIT were able to figure out the identities of nearly 50 people who had submitted personal genetic information for a research study — information that purportedly had been “de-identified” so as to protect the subjects privacy.
The woman in L.A. simply wanted a facelift. That’s all. But what she got was a nightmare – and a lesson for any of us who might be lured into the under-studied territory of cosmetic stem cell procedures.
Fixing the twin public health “epidemics” in this country — abuse of opioid painkillers by addicts and under-treatment of legitimate pain patients who often need those same drugs — will take time, a lot of creative thinking and a willingness to change dysfunctional government policies.