Meds

“The meds made me do it”: Unpacking the Nick Reiner tragedy

Meds

December 25, 2025

“The meds made me do it” has become a familiar refrain whenever psychiatric treatment intersects with tragedy. It is a phrase heavy with implication, suggesting loss of control, a sense of medical betrayal, and a system that failed at its most basic task: keeping people safe. When cases like the Nick Reiner tragedy enter the public consciousness, that phrase resurfaces almost reflexively, offering a deceptively simple explanation for something incredibly …

The dangers of oral steroids for seasonal illness

Megan Milne, PharmD

Meds

December 25, 2025

“I’m here (cough) to pick up (cough) the steroid,” says the visibly sick patient at the pharmacy. The pharmacist tries not to breathe in too deeply to catch the contagion as she hands over the box of pills. The patient has no idea that others have nicknamed it “poison” or “the Devil’s drug,” because it’s not worth it. The risks of casually prescribing prednisone or Medrol Dosepaks for seasonal illnesses …

L-theanine for stress and cognition

Kamren Hall

Meds

December 22, 2025

As a medical student, I’ve seen firsthand how stress and cognitive overload can wear people down, both in patients and in myself. During one particularly difficult exam block, a friend casually mentioned L-theanine, a supplement found in green tea, that supposedly helps with focus and calm. That got me curious: Was this just hype, or is there actually something to it?

So I took a closer look at the research.

L-theanine is …

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L-theanine for stress and cognition

The AI innovation-access gap in medicine

Tiffiny Black, DM, MPA, MBA

Meds

December 22, 2025

Artificial intelligence has transformed pharmaceutical science more rapidly than any other part of health care. AI can now:

Identify molecular targets faster than human researchers
Compress early discovery timelines from years to months
Simulate how millions of compounds might behave in the body
Predict toxicity or poor efficacy before a drug is ever synthesized
Help design personalized therapies built on real-world clinical data

Recent analyses in Drug Discovery Today and …

How deprescribing in psychiatry offers a path to safer care

Muhamad Aly Rifai, MD

Meds

December 19, 2025

America learned to add medications. Add one for sleep. Add one for nausea from the first. Add one for weight gain from the second. Add a second antidepressant when the first loses effect. Add a stimulant when a mood stabilizer slows a teenager down. Add an antipsychotic when anxiety erupts in the clinic room. Add a statin because a lab number sits outside a guideline range. Patients, however, feel the …

The economics of medical weight loss

Howard Smith, MD

Meds

December 11, 2025

Most know me for my insights about medical malpractice litigation. However, ever since the 2000s, my practice has focused on medical weight loss management, and I have developed other insights. I developed these insights as a private practitioner, as an employee of a medical weight loss clinic, which may have gone out of business because it no longer has a public persona, and as a general contractor for a weight …

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The economics of medical weight loss

Why the cannabis ethics debate is really about human suffering

Gerald Kuo

Meds

December 10, 2025

Most discussions about cannabis stay on the surface: legality, crime, or medical claims. But the core question is this: What suffering does a society allow? After watching a recent documentary with police, lawyers, physicians, and families, I found cannabis is the stage. The real drama is the system behind it. When ethics is pushed far, inconsistencies become impossible to ignore.

1. Legal ethics: When the law punishes pain instead of harm

Some …

Testosterone cardiovascular risk: FDA update 2025

Martina Ambardjieva, MD

Meds

December 1, 2025

Testosterone therapy is receiving renewed attention, not only from patients but also from regulatory agencies. In recent months, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) updated the safety information for testosterone products, reflecting new evidence on cardiovascular risk. This has generated understandable questions among men who are considering therapy and clinicians who prescribe it.

As a urologist, I frequently meet patients who are uncertain about the safety of testosterone treatment, particularly …

Are you neurodivergent or just bored?

Martha Rosenberg

Meds

November 18, 2025

Do you get bored when reading a boring book? Do you struggle to concentrate when you haven’t had enough sleep? Do you have difficulty following instructions, make careless mistakes and forget to return calls? Are you sometimes the last one to “get” a joke?

You may be “suffering from” with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and are “neurodivergent” and “on the spectrum.”

Today’s ASD “neurodivergence” craze has spawned at least two lucrative and …

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Are you neurodivergent or just bored?

Pharmacy benefit manager reform vs. direct drug plans

Leah M. Howard, JD

Meds

November 6, 2025

Much has been made of the move by President Donald Trump and the pharmaceutical industry to offer direct-purchase drug programs at heavily discounted rates. Following the announcement of these new programs and TrumpRx, we’ve heard news and opinion pieces from every major outlet, but missing in the conversation is one of the most important voices: the patient. Key questions remained unanswered:

“What does this mean for my care?”

“Does this work with …

A cautionary tale about pramipexole

Anonymous

Meds

November 4, 2025

I never thought I’d be the cautionary tale.

For decades, I worked at a financial company. I’m a youth sports coach, a husband, and a father of two. I’ve spent decades coaching, mentoring players, and proudly producing high school sports telecasts. I built a life around leadership, precision, and community.

But none of that prepared me for what happened when I was prescribed pramipexole (Mirapex) to treat Parkinson’s.

The warnings were there: compulsive …

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A cautionary tale about pramipexole

My persistent adverse reaction to an SSRI

Scott McLean

Meds

November 2, 2025

Two years ago, I took a single 20 mg dose of escitalopram. Like millions of others, I was prescribed this antidepressant with the expectation that it would help, or at worst, have mild side effects that would pass. Instead, I experienced an immediate and severe adverse reaction. What I could not have imagined then was that the symptoms would not resolve; they have persisted and, over time, have only worsened.

Since …

Tofacitinib: a lesson in heart-immune health

Larry Kaskel, MD

Meds

October 6, 2025

When the FDA put a black box warning on tofacitinib in 2021, the message was blunt: more heart attacks, more cancers, and more blood clots. The warning came from the ORAL Surveillance trial, which followed over 4,000 patients with rheumatoid arthritis already at high cardiovascular risk. Compared to TNF blockers, patients on tofacitinib had:

Heart attacks and strokes: About one extra event for every 111 patients treated over four years.

…

The case for regulating, not banning, kratom

Heidi Sykora, DNP, RN

Meds

October 3, 2025

Kratom (Mitragyna speciosa) has become a topic of significant debate among clinicians, policymakers, and the public due to differing views on its safety, pharmacology, and regulatory requirements. A recent article raises important concerns about kratom’s pharmacological actions, potential for addiction, psychiatric risks, and regulatory challenges. Although the goal of protecting public health is admirable, it is crucial that discussions around kratom are rooted in current scientific evidence and avoid …

How India-Pakistan tensions could break America’s generic drug pipeline

Adwait Chafale

Meds

September 25, 2025

With over 270 active drug shortages and growing global instability, the United States must protect itself from a worsening crisis in cancer care. The fragile supply of generic chemotherapy drugs like cisplatin, which is important for treating bladder, lung, and testicular cancer, could collapse if geopolitical tensions between India and Pakistan escalate further. To preserve this diminishing supply, the U.S. must reduce its overreliance on Indian pharmaceutical manufacturing and …

The unfair war on buprenorphine

Brian Lynch, MD

Meds

September 23, 2025

In my years as a physician on the front lines of addiction and pain medicine, I have never encountered a medication as transformative as buprenorphine (Suboxone). I have seen patients, broken by years of opioid addiction, have their lives change within an hour of their first dose, ready to reclaim a life they thought was lost. For these patients, buprenorphine is as essential as insulin is for a person with …

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The unfair war on buprenorphine

Drug giants face suit over hidden cancer risks

Martha Rosenberg

Meds

September 20, 2025

Bridgett Brown, a resident of California, developed breast cancer from using brand-name and generic versions of the antipsychotics Risperdal (risperidone) and Zyprexa (olanzapine) says a new lawsuit from the Wisner Baum law firm.

Neither Brown or her two prescribing physicians knew or “had reason to know” that the drugs could cause breast cancer since the drug manufacturers “obfuscated and disclaimed such risks while promoting these dangerous, expensive drugs over safer, …

The diseconomics of scale: How Indian pharma’s race to scale backfires on U.S. patients

Adwait Chafale

Meds

September 16, 2025

Why Indian pharmaceutical companies run the risk of driving up U.S. consumer drug prices when scaling too quickly: the diseconomics of scale.

Why the U.S. looks to India as a global supply chain hub for medications

India’s pharmaceutical industry saves U.S. consumers billions, but scaling too fast is a mistake. Premature scaling through mergers and acquisitions (M&A) is not just unsustainable, it is reckless and a recipe for inefficiency, error, and rising …

A psychiatrist’s 20-year journey with ketamine

Muhamad Aly Rifai, MD

Meds

September 4, 2025

The day I first watched ketamine lift a human being out of despair, I was standing in a quiet room at the National Institute of Mental Health. The fluorescent lights hummed, the monitor ticked, and a young adult who had been drowning for months came up for air. Hours, not weeks. That speed rewired me as much as it rewired their brain. In the early 2000s, most of us were …

How drug companies profit by inventing diseases

Martha Rosenberg

Meds

September 4, 2025

Funding from direct-to-consumer (DTC) “ask your doctor” drug ads has captured news media outlets and all but blocked important health stories like these. Read on.

1. “Hormone replacement therapy” (HRT) is back.

It is said that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, and nowhere is this more evident than the re-marketing of HRT to menopausal women who do not remember the first debacle (which increased the risk …

Meds

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