AMBIANCE & VANITY

(via thingssheloves)

France - 1, US - 0

“Under the new law, the French Health Products Safety Agency (AFSSAPS), which came under fire for its role in keeping Mediator on the market, is being overhauled and renamed the National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products (ANSM). Potential new drugs now have to be compared with existing approved ones, instead of just with placebos, if they are to be reimbursed under the public health insurance system, and pharmaceutical companies applying for a drug’s approval must declare any links they have with outside organizations, physicians, and researchers or face criminal sanctions for failure to comply.” (source)

Contemplating an opportunity to go to Germany over spring break to learn about health economics, especially as it relates to their pharmaceutical industry. This is a definite research interest of mine, but I can’t really justify the cost right now (no travel funds and little notice would mean almost $2k out of pocket).

(Re: this little rant.)

(via thingssheloves)

Summer 2012 Internship Search

& thus it begins. From the website of a notable DC health policy think tank:

“Only applicants meeting minimum qualifications for the research position will be considered. No phone calls please. [COMPANY] welcomes resumes from all qualified applicants, particularly women and minorities.”

Thanks for that clarification. As a woman, I had assumed I wasn’t welcome to apply to a research-intensive job.

If Only In My Dreams →

(via nogreatillusion)

What is coming home for the holidays for, if not to remind you that home doesn’t really exist anymore? Or, if it does, it is the tiny apartment you have decorated for yourself, with the slanting floors and running toilet and all the dishes in the sink. Coming home, you discover a new homesickness that exhausts you, and spend half the time napping in a twin bed that was never yours. The tree is fake and the fireplace is electric and all the Christmas carols in your ipod couldn’t make it snow this year. 

Coming home for the holidays is for torturing yourself over ex-boyfriends. It is the eternal struggle over whether or not to have a drink with someone who knows best how to make you cry and has seen you in the shower with soap in your eyes. It is human to miss being known so well, but you can’t come back to him with all new bruises and expect him to know what to do with you. You wish for letters. It seems tawdry and grossly modern to let someone tell you they still love you over text message.

When you find yourself at your mother’s front door, which is not your front door, and you raise your fist to knock, you wonder what it means to miss so many things that don’t exist anymore. This is how it happens, halfway through your twenties, to know, suddenly and irreversibly, that you are a person who exists despite so many things disappearing. You are here without the house you grew up in.  You are here without a boyfriend, or any discernible long-term goals. You are here. Your parents are divorced. Your father brings his girlfriend over. Your mother has a new ring. You are still here, goddamn it. That’s everything. Being here and trying so hard - that’s all of it.

love love this cover.

How Soon Is Now? by Mike Viola
originally by The Smiths
(via copycats, posted by liezlwashere) 

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

— Truman Capote (via simko)

need!

(via slantback)

I could eat a horse is a spaghetti measuring tool by Stefán Pétur Sólveigarson

(Source: szymon, via slantback)

grad school rant of the day.

five (!) finals down (biostatistics part 1 & 2, regression analysis, healthcare finance, healthcare management and org behavior) and one to go (a basic healthcare structure and policy survey course — looking forward to more policy and research-centric classes next semester). after the policy final tomorrow afternoon, just two short-ish papers (and a few more espressos) stands between me and a decent winter break. which i need to spend internship hunting, but who cares!

so.

current rant of the day: pharmaceutical companies do not need to prove drug efficacy against current market alternatives to gain approval from the FDA. clinical trials test for efficacy against placebos, and that the benefits outweigh the risks. 

WHAT. 

HOW IS THIS OKAY? even if you are creating a me-too, generic drug, it should show at LEAST the same efficacy as what is on the market currently (maybe with a small variance to account for a decreased price point and improved access). there is a disincentive for drug companies to create innovative drugs that actually improve health outcomes. 

i know, i know, too much government regulation = bad but come on, get it together FDA!

copycats:

“Perth” as remixed by The Polish Ambassador

Original by Bon Iver

* shifts the original into an “electric lullaby”, similar to Postal Service remix work.

(download for free @ The Polish Ambassador blog)

student, ball so hard university

tomorrow is a big day. in addition to a test in the morning, six hours of class, and studying for two finals on thursday, i will be presenting my first policy poster*. to me, this signifies the parallel, but very opposite career leap i took a few months ago from management consulting to academia. i remember walking the halls of NIH in awe of the research posters and publications, while toting a beautiful, (expensive but) meaningless deck for some upper-management-type-client.

in other news, i have been listening to this song on repeat for inspiration. best song ever, made even better by terrell suggs. i have no shame.

*using an incentivized rotation program to reduce maldistribution of nurse practitioners and thus, improve access to primary care in Montana (a group effort)

You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place. Like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.

— Azar Nafisi (via human-voices)

(Source: paradoxicalsentiments, via human-voices)

What are you?

One of his students asked Buddha,  

“Are you the messiah?” “No,” answered Buddha.

“Then are you a healer?” “No,” Buddha replied.

“Then are you a teacher?” the student persisted.

“No, I am not a teacher.”

“Then what are you?” asked the student, exasperated.  

“I am awake,” Buddha replied.

(via human-voices)

sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think,
I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside
remembering all the times you’ve felt that way, and
you walk to the bathroom, to your toilet, see that face
in the mirror, oh my oh my oh my, but you comb your hair anyway,
get into your street clothes, feed the cats, fetch the
newspaper of horror, place it on the coffee table, kiss your
wife goodbye, and then you are backing the car out into life itself,
like millions of others you enter the arena once more.

you are on the freeway threading through traffic now,
moving both towards something and towards nothing at all as you punch
the radio on and get Mozart, which is something, and you will somehow
get through the slow days and the busy days and the dull
days and the hateful days and the rare days, all both so delightful
and so disappointing because
we are all so alike and so different.

you find the turn-off, drive through the most dangerous
part of town, feel momentarily wonderful as Mozart works
his way into your brain and slides down along your bones and
out through your shoes.

it’s been a tough fight worth fighting
as we all drive along
betting on another day.

— charles bukowski (via thechocolatebrigade)

(via seasilked)