Psychiatric care is a difficult field for many patients and providers to navigate. The ethics of psychiatry are constantly changing and are held under great scrutiny. In the eyes of the public, treating mental illness is not as straightforward as treating physical illness.

People with severe mental illness are more likely to be subject to homelessness, violence and unemployment. For many people with psychotic disorders, they’re likely to experience an involuntary psychiatric hold – known as a 5150, which enables them to be held in a psychiatric hospital for evaluation and potentially to be held longer if they’re deemed incapable of checking themselves out or caring for themselves.

Depression is one of the most life-threatening mental illnesses in the United States today. Treatment resistant depression, which does not respond readily to talk therapy or medication — the most frequently prescribed treatments for major depression — can lead to self loathing, isolation and thoughts of suicide. Suicide is currently among the leading causes of death in America.  Even medication can have drawbacks, with first line therapies often taking as long as 6 to 8 weeks before being effective. 

Faced with the long timeline of drug therapy and unwanted side effects, patients with severe depression sometimes turn to nontraditional treatments such as electroconvulsive therapy and perhaps surprisingly, ketamine therapy — a drug known as ‘Special K’ by recreational drug users. A staggering 70% of patients responded to ketamine therapy for treatment of depression in one study performed.  The study examined the use of intravenous ketamine  for depressed patients at imminent risk of suicide, and with the rapid response shown by patients, makes ketamine a potentially attractive "rescue medication" for depressed patients in need of immediate relief.

The Ebola virus, discovered in 1976 near the Ebola River that can cause a severe and often fatal disease called Ebola virus disease (EVD).  Since the first discovery in 1976, there have been sporadic outbreaks of EVD, with the most recent one in 2013-2016 affecting West African countries, mainly Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.  Fruit bats are the most likely reservoir of the Ebola virus.  Ebola is deadly in about 70% of those infected with Ebola; the 2013-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa claimed more than 11,000 lives.

As a pharmaceutical or biotech company, if you haven't had to deal with high potency API (HPAPI) compounds yet, chances are you will eventually.  Approximately 25 percent of drugs in development worldwide are classified as highly potent, with this percentage expected to grow over the coming years; the global HPAPI market is expected to reach nearly $26 billion by 2022.

HPAPIs are a rapidly growing segment of the pharmaceutical industry, primarily due to an increased focus on targeted therapeutics, especially in oncology.  A compound is classified as highly potent if it has an occupational exposure limit (OEL) of ≤10μg/m3, a daily therapeutic dose of ≤10mg/day or if a 1 mg/kg/day dose produces serious toxicity in laboratory animals.

25% of drugs currently in development worldwide are highly potent.

We have all been there when we need to determine various costs and where they come from.  We stare at spreadsheets, trying to gather the necessary data, critical and nonessential, and using our calculations to determine how we can lower costs.  This approach is not only time consuming, but inaccurate and inefficient, but what are the alternatives?

Physical health and mental health are definitively linked, and have been for some time. However, the extent that diet and exercise has on mental health remains unknown. There are anecdotes of certain diets lowering blood pressure by seemingly impossible amounts, diabetics claiming to be cured by their lifestyle and even claims of going into cancer remission as a result of a person’s diet.  None of these claims have been seriously substantiated, but recently a diet known as the DASH diet has been linked to lower blood pressure and decreased risk of depression.  Is it possible that something as simple and straightforward as your diet can affect your mental health?

This year's flu season has been unprecedentedly aggressive in comparison to recent years, causing levels of panic in the United States on the level of the H1N1 outbreak that occurred in 2009. Also known as swine flu, H1N1 caused rising levels of fear on a global level, with magazine covers publishing headlines about the epidemic and leading the World Health Organization to address the matter publicly, declaring it a pandemic.

In the Philippines, the government is currently dealing with a public health crisis surrounding the Dengue virus. After being inoculated with the Dengue vaccine known as Dengvaxia, children have fallen ill and succumbed to illness, some even falling sick to the Dengue virus within thirty days of their initial inoculation.