To treat certain types of medical conditions, such as some forms of vision loss or cancer, patients have to receive drugs through periodic injections. These doctor visits can be time-consuming—sometimes happening once per week—and demoralizing, and the drugs affect the whole body instead of the place where they're most needed, decreasing their efficacy.
Taking a medication every day, or multiple times a day, is way too much work. You're bound to forget every once in a while. So what if you could program a cell to release the medication for you? In a study published this week, a group of bioengineers describe a way to do exactly that, taking advantage of the body's natural rewards system to release the medicine during the day.
The subtle art of lying on a therapist's couch is in rapid decline. Psychotherapy, the traditional one-on-one weekly session with a therapist, has been on the downswing for years, as more and more psychiatrists and even primary care doctors prescribe psychotropic medications instead of therapy. As the graphic above illustrates, between 1998 and 2007, psychotherapy use for people being treated for mental health conditions in the US decreased from almost 16 per cent to 10.5 per cent, and therapy use in conjunction with medication went from 40 per cent to 32 per cent. By contrast, usage rates of medication alone shot up from 41 per cent to a little more than 57 per cent
