Oswalt is someone that the Boing Boing staff (and many others) are fans of…I suspect that’s why they shared it.
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Also Feb 3rd is (apparently - I’d never heard of it before yesterday) National Wear Red Day, specifically for women with heart disease.
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You’re right, death by overprescribed medication is hardly a problem worth worrying about. What was I thinking?
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I’m unaware of there being a serious problem with death due to low-dose stimulant medications like are taken for ADD.
Mind you, I’m well aware of:
In BC it actually is being used to cut cocaine (also heroin, meth, pills, etc…). The fentanyl they’re using is coming from China, cheap as dirt and it’s in everything right now. Which is why we’ve had nearly 1000 OD deaths since the start of last year, and not just amongst opiate users.
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You don’t need to have a problem in isolation for it being a problem. If everyone starts taking Adderall, it is very likely that sooner or later they will also take something else, and at that point the combination is the problem - which is basically what happened here. Overprescription makes bad scenarios more likely, even if the drug per se is not the problem.
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Thank you for this. I had posted the above days ago to a friend and when I learned about the Seattle fentanyl lab raids in 2016, came upon the Twitter account @ODLives and Trent Gillaspie’s Judgmental Maps book showing Fentanyl Overdoses in an east-of-me state I thought I’d have to backpedal/apologize for the China-source statement as ignorant. I see now that my comment was not ignorant.
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Yes. Especially heart conditions in women, because our symptoms present differently.
I have a mild heart murmur, one that may require a valve repair/replacement at some point. It took over a year to figure it out, because the symptoms are so vague and mine sometimes goes quiet. I get anxiety attacks – are they because my heart is mildly malfunctioning, or because I have a C-PTSD diagnosis because I’m female, had abusive parents, and dealt with the fallout of that through my 20s? I have either mild allergy induced asthma that exercise can sometimes provoke, or there’s a point where my heart can’t keep up. Figuring out which (it turned out to be the asthma) took months of monitoring and documenting because it isn’t consistent. Is the pain in my neck because I’m tense, or because the vagus nerve is sending warning signals? Nausea? That’s a heart symptom, but it’s also a stress symptom, an anxiety symptom, and a reflux symptom. And when I notice my heartbeat fluttering or skipping or pounding, or note fluctuations in my blood pressure and pulse, am I worrying because I now know I have a heart murmur, or because those are symptoms of a change in status? But I’m unlikely to ever experience angina, a crushing pain in my chest and left arm, or any of the other common heart attack symptoms.
Lots of women have experienced doctors – male and female – diminishing symptoms and over-attributing to anxiety. Our pain is diminished. Because we’re willing to note small changes in our physicality, and because we’re willing to speak up about them, we’re considered complainers. And while men are more likely to experience heart health issues over all, women are more likely to experience fatal heart problems due to delayed or misdiagnosis.
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The now-deleted post I was responding to went beyond mere speculation and outright asserted that Ms. McNamara’s death was due to illegal drug use. I felt this definitely went too far.
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It’s a very interesting puzzle. Every person with an executive dysfunction diagnosis that I’ve met has expressed wariness at the prospect (or current reality) of being prescribed amphetamine. And those for whom it didn’t help had no hesitation about trying something else.
If you suffer chronic pain, you’re not looking for a high, you’re looking for a way to stop the damned pain or, failing that, the suffering.
If you suffer out-of-the-blue panic attacks and/or nightmares and flashbacks related to past psychological trauma, you’re not looking for a high but rather sanctuary from such emotional ambushes.
If you suffer chronically impaired attention and difficulty with time awareness–again–you’re not looking for a high, you’re looking for a way to bring yourself up to the baseline that every ‘normal’ person takes for granted.
Baseline. Or, as the clinicians usually put it, ‘normal global functioning’. This is all anyone with a chronic, life-obstructing condition wants.
I’ve no doubt that’s what McNamara wanted, too. Whether her treatment was successful in helping her achieve and maintain this is beside the point. To think that she was literally dying for effective treatment is just heart-wrenching.
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One day of being normal would be awesome.
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Same.
I used to work with a guy several years back that lost his wife to cancer. Second marriage for them both, loves of each others lives, both about 60 and looking to retire together in a couple years.
I don’t know that you actually ever recover from something like that, but I saw him fairly recently and he was doing well. It was VERY, VERY hard on him for some time, as you can imagine. He got laid off a year ago and looked for work for a while, then said screw it, I’m retired now… He’s back to running down by the beach and working on his MG (in itself a full time job), I was glad to hear.
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Mack game?
The car from the UK.
Did he get it by trading in his white Chrysler LeBaron?
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a loss like this is 
I wouldn’t care to speculate in this case, but sometimes people who medicate frequently will find a cocktail of 2 or 3 things that create the ideal balance, minimize the negatives and maximize the desired effects. these sorts of combos are much more common then you’d suspect.
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We’ve been doing that as a species for a very long time. Even dogs with upset stomachs know to eat grass to make themselves sick. Alcohol, caffeine, cocaine, cannabis and morphine were all relatively harmless and widely used in their growing areas until industrialisation made it easy to overdose (and their use got confused with morality)
My GP is one of the intelligent ones and leaves me to work out what dosages I need for my various annoying but not life threatening conditions. We review things once a year. I do take a couple of nonprescription things but I have used the NIH extensively to review toxicity, long term effects, contraindications and so on. I’ve even conducted single blind trials on myself (You can buy empty capsules very cheaply on eBay for this).
I don’t spend much time on this and I’ve probably saved the NHS a lot of money.
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The benefit of having a congenital heart defect and a gigantic surgical scar is that when I say I have chest pain, doctors take me seriously. The drawbacks are, well, everything else.
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It’s not up to us to judge, IMHO. We don’t know what kind of pain (mental and physical) this woman was living under. Chronic disease take a horrible toll on some people.
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I know of a woman who required a prosthetic heart valve at 60’s. It was quite a shock to her. She had a bicuspid aortic valve, which tends to narrow, and make the heart work harder. She had no idea. Probably other symptoms made them look.
