Author: shortstride

Dr. Andrew Kolodny, director of opioid policy research at Brandeis University, says doctors prescribe opioids to fewer black patients for a few reasons. Studies show doctors are less sensitive to a black patient’s pain, and some may worry that black patients will become addicted to or sell the medication. This form of racial stereotyping has had a “protective effect” on black Americans, he says. “The black patient is less likely to become addicted to opioids because they’re less likely to be prescribed,” he says. “And they’re also less likely to have opioids in the medicine chest where family members could become opioid-addicted.” When asked if black Americans are being prescribed alternative pain medications instead of opioids, he says their pain more likely remains untreated but he’s not aware of research on this subject. If a doctor subscribes to stereotypes of what an addict looks like — nonwhite, from a low-income community — the physician may assume their white, middle-class patients are immune to addiction, he says. “Rather than recognizing that addiction is a disease that can happen to just about anybody who’s repeatedly exposed to a highly addictive drug,” he says, “they may just assume that addiction is something that happens to those people.”

Eighty-six percent of Americans say they are satisfied with the way things are going in their personal lives.

Bottom Line

Strong majorities of Americans have consistently reported satisfaction with their personal lives over the past four decades. But more recently, the degree of satisfaction has varied, particularly by political party and race. Changes in satisfaction often reflect respondents’ political lenses, such as a buoyancy in Republicans’ views of their lives under a president of their own political party, as in 2007 and this year — while Democrats’ ratings have become depressed since Trump took office. Americans who approve of the incumbent president’s performance are generally more likely to be very satisfied with their personal lives.

Gallup has studied hundreds of countries around the world over more than a decade, and has found that decreases in happiness have often coincided with major change events, such as Trump’s election, the Brexit vote in the U.K. or the Arab Spring. While the life satisfaction question may not measure happiness per se, it is one that leaders will want to monitor.

Bigger cities and more irrigation lead to fights; Florida v. Georgia

When Daniel Poston, a second-year medical student in New York, opened the App Store on his iPhone a couple of weeks ago, he was astonished to see an app for a new heart study prominently featured. Patients often learn about new research studies through in-person conversations with their doctors. But not only did this study, run by Stanford University, use a smartphone to recruit consumers, it was financed by Apple. And it involved using an app on the Apple Watch to try to identify irregular heart rhythms.