American military veterans have a suicide problem.
Some have theorized the reason is deployment-related trauma.
Leveraging the random assignment of new soldiers to units with different deployment cycles, Bruhn et al. found that was wrong.
Deployment did not increase suicides.
Looking only at violent deployments (ones with peer casualties), there aren't noncombat mortality effects either.
What explains veteran suicide rates?
The reason seems to be that the proposition is wrong: veterans do not have increased suicide risk.
This may seem surprising, but it's not. Their suicide rates are elevated over the general population because most of them are young White men. That group has a suicide issue.
There are good and bad parts to this observation.
On the one hand, it means that there is not selection of suicidal people into the military.
On the other, demographic selection makes this problem into one that agencies like the VA will probably not be able to fix on their own
because it's not a soldier problem, it's a young White male problem.
I don't know how this can be fixed, but presumably tackling opiate use would help.
Soliman (2022) found that DEA crackdowns on overprescribing pharmacies resulted in fewer local suicide deaths.
Soliman also found that sanctioning specific doctors affected opioid-related mortality more generally without impacting suicide rates. Effects were generally larger for males than females and they were larger for people aged 30-49 than those aged 15-29 or 85+. No race data.
Kennedy-Hendricks et al. found that Florida's pill mill crackdown reduced opioid overdose mortality considerably.
Their supplement contained details on the characteristics of the people who died from opioid overdoses, but I wasn't able to access it.
In my latest article, I documented that the only RCT for functional medicine methods appears fraudulent🧵
Before getting into it, what's functional medicine?
It's a pseudoscience used to bilk patients by getting them on an unending cycle of tests, supplements, and more tests.
Functional medicine's practitioners claim that they can reveal and treat so-called "root causes" of people's health problems
These are proposed to be things like gut health, toxin burdens, and various chemical and hormonal imbalances
They find these things with unproven tests
If you run enough tests, you will be able to find something that looks 'off' about a patient, and if you're a functional medicine doctor, that's your 'A-ha!' moment, even if—as is usually the case—the result is just a false-positive and treating it is unlikely to do anything.
If you want to add beds to a hospital, build facilities, purchase diagnostic scanners, but you live somewhere with CON laws, then you have to prove you're not creating competition for other medical facilities in the area, which is often the whole state.
No. Competition. Allowed.
The idea behind these laws is that people will spend excessively on healthcare, so to combat that, we'll have people report if there's more spending needed before approving it.
Nutrition science is the area of science that's suffered the most in the replication crisis. It is a graveyard of theories and pseudoscientific bullshit.
Now:
The HHS is going to make doctors to sit through 40 hours of classes where they'll have to take that bullshit seriously.
This reads like a list of the things that fared the worst in all of nutrition science and stuff with NO EVIDENCE.
When I read through this, my mouth was agape.
Whoever wrote this trash needs fired for incompetence. Mentally retarded people should not hold keep government posts.
'What did you learn in your mandatory nutrition misinformation class?'
'Well, if a patient comes in with a migraine, I'm supposed to sell them a WHOOP bracelet or an Oura ring so I can help them figure out their health age.'
Strength training is a highly effective way to improve your flexibility, and I've made a graphic to put this into understandable terms:
This is from a meta-analysis of strength training trials.
What makes that so useful is that there's major publication bias for strength outcomes (pictured).
But, since authors weren't looking at it, there's no publication bias for flexibility outcomes.
Studies made their way into this meta-analysis because they had a flexibility outcome, but they made their way into the literature because they showed positive strength results.
This could indirectly biased the flexibility results because of selection on a correlated outcome.