Health-Records Company Pushed Opioids to Doctors in Secret Deal – Bloomberg
This is APPALLING. holy crap.
To doctors opening patients’ electronic records across the U.S., the alert would have looked innocuous enough. A pop-up would appear, asking about a patient’s level of pain. Then, a drop-down menu would list treatments ranging from a referral to a pain specialist to a prescription for an opioid painkiller. Click a button, and the program would create a treatment plan. From 2016 to spring 2019, the alert went off about 230 million times. The tool existed thanks to a secret deal. Its maker, a software company called Practice Fusion, was paid by a major opioid manufacturer to design it in an effort to boost prescriptions for addictive pain pills — even though overdose deaths had almost tripled during the prior 15 years, creating a public-health disaster. The software was used by tens of thousands of doctors’ offices.
(tags: healthcare capitalism opioids health-records pain painkillers addiction practice-fusion)
How to Actually Personally Fight Climate Change – Erika Reinhardt
These are concrete, practical suggestions that it’s possible for a normal person to achieve — do them!
Mitigating the climate crisis is top of mind for many people. But it’s such a complex issue that it can be hard to distinguish between data-backed improvements and feel-good distractions. This is your action list with lots of context along the way on why not just how so you can soon be an emissions-fighting climate superhero. If you want to get started by just running through and checking off the easy items, start here.
(tags: climate-change green-living future climate carbon tips advice todo)