Psychedelics are back! As readers of Scientific American know, scientists have recently reported that psychedelics show promise for treating disorders such as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anxiety in terminal cancer patients. This weekend, researchers and other enthusiasts are gathering in New York City for a two-day celebration, "Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics," sponsored by the [...]

My frail, 92-year-old mother was prescribed 80 mgs of the cholesterol-lowering drug, or statin, simvastatin for years. She fell four times in the last four years of her life: the last fall was the least forgiving. Doctors diagnosed her with rhabdomyolysis, a life-threatening condition, and acute kidney failure; she was dead within 8 weeks. Source: [...]

When doctors take patients off of a prescription medicine, it is often for a good reason. But pharmacists don’t always get the memo. A new study finds that more than 1 in 100 discontinued prescriptions were filled by the pharmacy anyway, putting some patients at serious risk. In the U.S., pharmacists filled more than 3.7 [...]

Take two of these—or should that be three? Or one? Congress recently took steps to improve the safety of children’s drugs. Now, a new study finds that those on the other end of the age spectrum also frequently receive medication that may put their health at risk. Approximately 20 percent of prescriptions that primary care [...]

April is coming and, with its approach, the latest publication from one of the most prolific synthetic chemists anywhere has just appeared. Forget esoteric technologies like small hairpin RNAs. With this entry into the literature, chemists finally have something useful to work on again. Their expertise and ingenuity can pragmatically address a specific instance of [...]

Booze is behind an estimated 2.1 million car accidents each year in the U.S.—which cause almost 11,000 traffic fatalities annually. But many drug users have claimed that a few puffs of pot before getting behind the wheel are perfectly harmless. A new study, however, shows that drivers who smoke marijuana within a few hours of [...]

Big clinical trials—to test new drugs or procedures—generate reams of important data about safety and efficacy. Only a fraction of that information sees the light of day, a publishing practice that could put patients at risk, according to a special report published this week in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). Even though scientific and medical [...]

The market for at least one class of vital drug seems to have gone haywire. Certain types of generic cancer drugs are really hard to find. In August, of the 34 generic cancer drugs available to patients, there were 14 that could only be found with great difficulty. “If you are a pediatric oncologist, you [...]

It’s no secret that many doctors get paid by pharmaceutical companies to talk to other docs—about general conditions, research trends or specific drugs—or to provide expertise for company research. But what has long been undisclosed is the amount of money that these drugmakers were giving physicians for their time. Thanks in part to some high-profile [...]

Who says love hurts? New research shows that strong romantic feelings actually ease physical pain via the same neural pathways as powerful drugs. By simply gazing at a picture of their beloved, undergraduates in a recent study were able to substantially reduce their experience of pain. The effect occurs thanks to a boost in the [...]

This week, a federal advisory committee of 33 experts convened to review data on the controversial type 2 diabetes drug, Avandia, and debated whether the drug should remain on the market. The meeting was prompted by recent studies suggesting that patients on the drug have an increased risk of heart attack. The U.S. Food and [...]

Predictive analytics—lumped under the faddish banner of Big Data—is the high-profile set of techniques that tame numeric deluges to deduce that a new epidemic is starting to break or that a last-minute steal of an airfare has just popped up. The best uses for Big D may be yet to come, though. The FDA just [...]

A milestone for Big Neuroscience came Wednesday with the publication in Nature of a study on the way genes switch on across the whole human brain. Whole brain is all the vogue. Neuroscientists have devoted inordinate energy in recent years to publicize  the need for, not only gene maps, but for a full wiring diagram [...]

When this headline from The Telegraph flashed across Google Reader, I couldn’t help but be amused: Scientists explain why the office party so often ends in embarrassment. From the article: Now scientists have come up with an explanation for why the office party is so often the cause of embarrassing and inappropriate behaviour. Researchers have [...]

It’s an ordinary afternoon at Copenhagen Central Station. At 2:32pm, a man who appears to be a run-of-the-mill street performer sets up a drum in the center of a large hall. A cellist joins him. A woman approaches with her flute. The melody is sort of recognizable… It sounds sort of like Ravel’s Bolero. Pretty [...]