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In 2016, 17 million painkillers were prescribed in Buncombe County, a sum that amounts to about 68 pills for every person living in the county. Opioids, a broad category of drugs that includes codeine, oxycodone, Vicodin, fentanyl and heroin, are at the center of a nationwide epidemic that counties across the U.S., including Buncombe, are scrambling to solve. Between 2014 and 2015, North Carolina was one of 20 states that witnessed an increase in the number of drug overdoses related...

Today is exactly twenty years, eight months and five days since my last cigarette. This happened after 16 years of heavy smoking, struggling to quit, getting a few days or a few weeks and then relapsing and getting full-on addicted immediately and feeling ashamed and demoralized. I started to smoke because I heard I'd lose weight. And I did! At first. My mother smoked heavily while I was in the womb, and I wondered if this explained why the little buzz of nicotine felt so wonderfully...

New research shows adults who develop psychotic disorders experience declines in IQ during childhood and adolescence, falling progressively further behind their peers across a range of cognitive abilities. The researchers from King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in the United States found falls in IQ start in early childhood, and suggest educational interventions could potentially delay the onset...

Guidelines for teenagers should stress the importance of vigorous physical activity and fitness to cut the risk of heart disease, new research suggests. Current NHS guidelines say people aged 5 to 18 should do at least 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity each day to improve their current and future health. But in a study of adolescents aged 12 to 17, University of Exeter researchers found significant differences between the effects of moderate activity (such as brisk...

In September 1944, trains in the Netherlands ground to a halt. Dutch railway workers were hoping that a strike could stop the transport of Nazi troops, helping the advancing Allied forces. But the Allied campaign failed, and the Nazis punished the Netherlands by blocking food supplies, plunging much of the country into famine. By the time the Netherlands was liberated in May 1945, more than 20,000 people had died of starvation. The Dutch Hunger Winter has proved unique in unexpected ways.

An announcement Tuesday by three of the nation’s corporate titans — Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase & Co. — that they are joining forces to address the high costs of employee health care has stirred the health policy pot. It immediately sent shock waves through the health sector of the stock market and reinvigorated talk about health care technology, value and quality. Though details regarding the undertaking are thin, the companies said in a release that their...

EVERETT, Wash. — Unable to walk or talk, barely able to see or hear, 5-year-old Maddie Holt waits in her wheelchair for a ride to the hospital. The 27-pound girl is dressed in polka-dot pants and a flowered shirt for the trip, plus a red headband with a sparkly bow, two wispy blond ponytails poking out on top. Her parents can’t drive her. They both have disabling vision problems; and, besides, they can’t afford a car. When Maddie was born in 2012 with the rare and usually fatal genetic...

It's admissions season, and across the country, thousands of admissions officers sit in front of screens, reading files full of transcripts, test scores, extracurricular profiles, letters of recommendation, and, of course, essays. I was once one of these officers, spending emotionally exhausting 12-hour days reviewing thousands of applications from Ivy League hopefuls over a span of five months. When I was a new admissions officer, the importance of each application component was drilled...

The date of the last time I used heroin correlating so closely with my daughter's birthdate felt like a horrible secret, like the worst math in the world.' To other mothers, I'd confide the minimum: "I'm in recovery," or "I 'got clean' before I had my daughter." I felt invested in a false narrative fairy tale of my recovery having happened overnight, as if the moment I found out I was pregnant the dark part of my life ended and the beautiful part began. In reality, my past and future bucked...

https://www.grandparentsplus.org.uk/Handlers/Download.ashx?IDMF=75a6b874-6666-4224-8770-48905670dbaf The Kinship Care: State of the Nation Survey This report is based on a survey of members of the Grandparents Plus Kinship Care Support Network, which includes almost 4,000 kinship carers. The results are based on responses from 671 kinship carers living in England and Wales, making it the largest ever survey of its kind. Carried out in February 2017 using both online and postal...

There was a time in the Columbia River Gorge when a group of chronically truant high school kids would have been a problem that engendered a flurry of finger-pointing. Oregon’s Wasco County Department of Youth Services would have blamed the school district for failing to educate the students; school district staff, in turn, would have said the kids needed to be in detention. And everyone would have found reasons why these high-risk youth were failing. “There were many excuses for students...

Part of the fun of being deeply immersed in the world of trauma and resilience is that you get to learn about pioneers around the world doing great work. Better still, sometimes you're able to persuade them to bring their work to LA! Kirstie Seaborne is based in the UK, where she supports parents and professionals in "responding to children under pressure." She does this by helping adults rewrite their embodied response to challenging behaviors. Kirstie already had a career in dance and...