Word: drugging
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There are few things that can make you feel dumber than a statistic. That's because there are few things that are more misleading. Suppose one cholesterol drug reduces your risk of dying from a heart attack by 42% and another reduces your risk by only 3.5%. No question about which one you'd take, right? Now suppose they're both the same drug...
...cholesterol numbers are drawn from an advertisement for the statin Zocor - a drug that the authors are careful not to dismiss out of hand, since it can indeed save lives, just not as many as its makers would like you to believe. The ad openly touts the 42% figure, which is based on a study in which 111 out of 2,221 people with heart disease who used Zocor later died of a heart attack. In a control group of heart patients who used a placebo, 189 out of 2,223 died. So the fact is there were indeed...
...Another, subtler problem can be the difference between what are known as surrogate outcomes and patient outcomes. A new drug or treatment may reliably lower cholesterol, say, or reduce the size of a tumor - these are surrogate outcomes - and the drug-maker would call that a success. But the ultimate goal of treatment isn't simply to give you lab results you can boast about, it's to make you feel better and live longer; those are the patient outcomes. Sometimes though, good surrogate outcomes don't lead to good patient outcomes. Hormone replacement therapy, for example, raises good cholesterol...
...where rational judgments are made, does not occur until the early- to mid-20s. At the state level, Missouri is leading the country by phasing out its large juvenile-detention institutions in favor of smaller facilities, closer to kids' homes, that offer more specialized services, like mental-health and drug counseling and education. In the process, the state claims to have reduced recidivism rates for juvenile offenders to 10%, compared with a national rate of 40% to 50%. "We cannot incarcerate our way out of this problem of juvenile crime," says Shay Bilchik, director of Georgetown University's Center...
...Surveys have determined that while as many as 75% of kids sentenced to some kind of facility need support for mental-health issues or drug counseling, only about a third are actually getting help. But Georgetown's Bilchik says there is a national movement to create more "wraparound support programs" - for mental health, education, drug counseling - to give prosecutors and judges more options than choosing between institutionalization and probation, which generally provide few services the kids need. "When you see additional services being offered, you see judges opting for them," he says...