first opinion
How to cope when your professional predecessors worked on CIA mind control projects
Christine
Kao for STAT
Casimir Klim, a fourth-year psychiatry resident at the Mayo Clinic, is fascinated by the troubled history of his chosen profession. Still, he found it jarring to learn that
during the 1950s and 1960s, psychiatrists at America’s top academic institutions supported two CIA projects that aimed to identify methods of controlling thought and behavior. This work often involved experimentation on vulnerable people, such as those who
were incarcerated or in psychiatric wards. Physicians at Klim’s own institution had conducted extensive research on deep brain stimulation, hypnosis, and psychedelic drugs — all of which the CIA attempted to use for their mind control programs.
“I found the matter-of-fact manner in which these physicians expounded on how medical science could be repurposed for coercion and domination jarring and nauseating to read,”
Klim writes in a First Opinion essay on his research. Read more on what he learned about
his profession and himself after looking into this partnership.
research
Female physicians deliver better results, especially for female patients
A large new study published yesterday in
Annals of Internal Medicine found that in a cohort of close to 800,000 Medicare patients, those who were treated by a female physician had lower mortality and readmission rates. While previous research has shown that patients
see better outcomes with
female physicians, here the improvement was especially significant for female patients, STAT’s Nalis Merelli tells us.
“Generally speaking, miscommunication, misunderstanding, and bias are more likely to occur when those in the majority become advocates for the minority,” Atsushi Miyawaki,
the study’s corresponding author, said in an email to STAT — like when a male physician treats a female patient. Male patients had similar mortality and readmission rates regardless of their physician’s gender, something that Miyawaki said should be subject
to further investigation.
heart disease
Afib more common in young people than previously thought, per study
Atrial fibrillation, the most common type of
abnormal heart beat, is on the rise among people under age 65, according to a study published yesterday in
Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology. The study included more than 67,000 people with Afib treated at the UPMC Heart and Vascular Institute between 2010 and 2019. Nearly a quarter of those patients were under
65 — a rate much higher than the typically cited prevalence of about 2%, the authors wrote.
The younger adults with Afib were more likely to be hospitalized for heart failure, stroke, or heart attack, and had significantly higher mortality rates compared to people
of similar age and gender. They also had a high number of cardiovascular risk factors including smoking, high BMI, diabetes, heart failure, a previous stroke, and more, which can contribute to further damaging the heart over time, researchers noted.
