Category: Uncategorized
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Writing My Way Through
I’m still uncomfortable being so public about this stuff, even with a nameless blog and a locked Twitter account. I certainly am not this open in everyday life. But it’s helpful for me, and I know is useful to at least some people. And I guess I’m still in the IDGAF phase: I’m doing the […]
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Just Raging at the Universe
Usually when I post here it’s when things are on an upswing. Some kind of rough episode has happened, but is starting to pass, and I need to digest it and look forward. Today I’m posting from the bottom, though. I feel like shit and just need to scream into the void. I still have […]
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Moving Forward
This has been a very strange couple of months. On the one hand, my book has been more successful than I ever imagined, I was promoted to full professor, and exciting opportunities keep landing in my in-box. Basically, all my professional dreams have come true. On the other, my capacities are clearly nowhere near where […]
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The New Normal?
It’s probably good news that I have not been writing here consistently. I’ve been fairly functional since the beginning of April—which is not to say anywhere near “normal,” meaning my pre-cancer state, but able to work and do many cognitively complex tasks. Although it is still unpredictable when the dreaded brain fog is going to […]
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An Update, and a Book Recommendation
Last time I wrote, about a month ago, things were bottoming out with the brain fog. My notes say things like “consuming, awful…sense-dominating” and “want to tear [my brain] out of my skull.” Good times. Then came a week or so of intense fatigue, where even lifting my arm from my position in bed took […]
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Where Things Are
It’s been a while since I’ve written. Unfortunately, that’s because things have been worse, not better. After six weeks of being pretty functional, I am now up to five weeks of bad and worsening brain fog. For the last two it’s been pretty incapacitating. I am on sabbatical, so for a while this was easier […]
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Pills, Power, Policy Part III
I started reading about the last seventy years of pharmaceutical regulation because I wanted to understand something about how the current system of drug pricing—oriented toward a value-based model in which price is (theoretically) based on the value of the additional (quality of) life the drug provides—came to be. That led me into what the […]
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This Was Not the Plan
I really don’t want to be writing this. I want to be reading obscure things about drug regulation and thinking about how our ideas about governing business evolved and toying around with next projects. But instead I am tethered to a body that won’t go along with my wishes. I could catalog symptoms, but long […]
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Dealing with Brain Fog
It appears that the two modes of this blog are “boring stuff about drug pricing” and “symptoms.” I guess we all process in different ways. I’ve mentioned before that brain fog has been something I’ve struggled with over the last few months. There are times—whole weeks, even—when I feel cognitively fine, and can’t really tell […]
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Pills, Power, Policy, Part 2
I’m still reading and thinking about Tobbell’s Pills, Power, and Policy, and Chapter 4 really sucked me in. It covers Estes Kefauver’s bid to reform the pharmaceutical industry from 1959 to 1962, culminating in the Kefauver-Harris Act. Kefauver, a Democratic from Tennessee and recent presidential candidate, was also chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust […]
One Year Later 