Author: Steven Findlay

Diabetes symptoms can be so mild that many people don’t even know they have it. Those who are diagnosed may stop taking their pills, because they find the side effects worse than disease’s limited symptoms. But it’s important to take this disease seriously because over time untreated or poorly treated diabetes can cause severe and irreversible complications like kidney, eye, and nerve damage or infections that lead to amputations. This article focuses on the pros and cons of the oral type 2 diabetes drugs. Almost all people with type 2 diabetes are candidates for one or more of these medicines…

Read More

The problem with muscle relaxants — and it’s a big problem — is this: Although the drugs are effective and have been in use for decades, most of them work through the central nervous system, causing general sedation and not by targeting muscle tissue. You might say: “who cares as long as they work.” That’s a legitimate perspective — the precise mechanism of action of many drugs is not known. And muscle pulls and spasms — especially in the neck and/or back — can be painful, limiting range of motion and disrupting sleep and normal activities for days. I’ve had…

Read More

Insomnia prescriptions are going down as both doctors and consumers learn more about the lack of efficacy and side effects associated with the meds. A group of medicines that became wildly popular over the past 20 years ended up posing serious dangers to some of the people who took them and to public health. But they also helped millions of people get a little bit more sleep. Yes, we are talking about the insomnia drugs doctors wrote just under 40,000 prescriptions for Belsomra in May, for example, compared to 2.6 million for zolpidem, according to IMS Health, a drug sales tracking firm.…

Read More