Word: drugging
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Americans love self-made men and women. And who was ever more literally self-made than Anna Nicole Smith? Described by acquaintances as a flat-chested teen, she shaped, nipped and tucked herself into a living hood ornament. She styled herself à la Marilyn Monroe and then, after fighting drug problems and ballooning, whittled herself down as a spokeswoman for TrimSpa diet supplements. According to her mother, she even invented her childhood, mythologizing her middle-class upbringing into a hardscrabble one, like Jay Gatsby in reverse. Feral, brazen and vacant, Smith was not talented in most usual senses...
Well, maybe. More and more, however, doctors are making the unnerving case that no matter how reliable a drug or other treatment appears to be, too often there's simply little hard evidence that it would make a long-term difference in a person's quality of life or prolonged survival. Obviously, drugs are tested rigorously to show that they are safe and effective before they are approved by the U.S. and other developed countries. But a clinical study is not the real world, and just because a drug leads to a statistically significant improvement in, say, cholesterol levels doesn...
After coming out on The Phil Donahue Show in 1992, the former lineman nearly met the same fate as Burke. He turned to petty theft and prostitution to support his drug habit. But after getting a diagnosis of HIV, Simmons tackled drugs and was baptized, and he says he has been celibate and sober for several years...
Researchers can gather all the hard-nosed evidence they want about the effectiveness of a particular drug or treatment. But there's one figure doctors don't much talk about despite its importance. It's called number needed to treat, or NNT, a new measure developed in the past 20 years that's one of the best-kept statistical secrets in medicine...
...effort to handicap those odds is where NNT comes in. It answers the question, How many people have to take this drug to avoid one heart attack? The same principle can be applied to avoiding one recurrence of cancer or stroke or whatever end point you choose to measure. In healthy men, the NNT for statins is about 50 (depending on which of dozens of statins is taken, age, family history, lifestyle and so on). So 50 men have to take these drugs in order to prevent a single--not necessarily fatal, heart attack...