somebodynew

Amphetamine (Dexedrine) is schedule II, not schedule I. Doctors cannot generally prescribe schedule I substances like LSD. Pseudoephedrine is a substituted amphetamine so referring to it as "an OTC amphetamine" is technically reasonable although potentially misleading.

Hydrogen sulfide is a severe example: it initially smells strongly of rotten eggs but quickly damages the nose until it is undetectable and further exposure can be lethal. For most other chemicals, smells only fade to the background during prolonged lab work through mundane desensitization.

I enjoy using the CSS named colors for web design because it provides a limited set of options to choose from. It's easier to decide on the best choice from a limited set of options than it is to find the global maximum in the entire RGB space.

I'll also forever have a fondness for "cornflower blue" because it was the default fill color when you created a new C# Xbox 360 game using Microsoft XNA.

I understand your frustration with the current state of psychiatry, but I think that you may be reading too much of it into my comment. I had no intention of shifting any blame from the wholly inappropriate combination of prescribed drugs or the psychiatrist to the patient, and I used very deliberate wording to intentionally avoid making any reference whatsoever to the gender of the patient. The point of my post was to highlight that this case appeared to be a manic episode which could be triggered by almost any antidepressant, not a rare and unique adverse effect that could only be caused by pramipexole or dopamine agonists.

I meant "stimulant" in the context of traditional dopamine reuptake inhibitors and releasing agents like amphetamine and ritalin which are almost incomparable to less controlled or uncontrolled compounds like modafinil, ephedrine, and caffeine. Even a high dose of caffeine will not produce effects anything like amphetamine. The mechanism of action between amphetamine and caffeine are fundamentally different rather than being a matter of strength. It's unfortunate and misleading that the word stimulant is used for both categories.

In general, it would be difficult to tell with an incomplete patient history whether a psychiatrist prescribing pramipexole for depression was making an irresponsible shot in the dark, or a calculated attempt to address something like treatment-resistant anhedonic depression after a few first lines, an MAOI, and referrals to an endocrinologist and a sleep study failed. That being said, I cannot think of any reasonable scenario that leads to simultaneously prescribing pramipexole and mood stabilizers. Perhaps it's too idealistic of me to hope that the pharmacist filling all three of those (plus two controlled substances...) would have called and asked for an explanation.

I omitted the Xanax entirely from my previous post because the polypharmacy here is such a mess, but I agree that it probably factors into disinhibition. I don't personally attribute much relevance to modafinil in this instance; while the wakefulness effects are often described mechanistically through dopamine, I have never seen anyone experience any traditional stimulant or dopamine agonist effects from modafinil.

My only experience with pramipexole and cabergoline are for low dose off-label use in persistent sexual dysfunction after the discontinuation of SSRI medication. The biggest difference I have seen between them is a much higher rate of discontinuation due to side effects (extreme tiredness) for pramipexole.

The article describes its first subject as having been diagnosed with simply "depression", but describes their medication regime as including lithium and lamotrigine which in combination is strongly suggestive of treatment for bipolar depression in particular. Given that the described behavior sounds very much like a manic episode, the article should have explained this connection before attempting to focus the blame on pramipexole.

Most antidepressants, even SSRIs, are medically recognized as potentially triggering mania in bipolar patients. While compulsive gambling and hypersexuality are associated with dopamine agonists, I think it may be misleading for the article to focus so heavily on a possible manic episode without discussing bipolar disorder at all and while implying that this was a unique effect of dopamine agonists.

This is not obvious to the average person outside of the industry. For example, most people would expect that text typed into a form field without clicking submit is private and has not been sent to anyone. It is obvious to a software developer that secretly sending the text back to a server while the user types is easy to implement, but posting an agent to read over someone's shoulder while they write a draft which they may choose not to send at all does not become morally acceptable just because modern technology has made this more practical than hiring a PI to watch through someone's house window from a public street.

Should they be allowed to record your mouse movements while on their site and sell information about how steady or shaky your hands appear to be to health insurance or car insurance companies?

It's only following people who posted their own photos voluntarily in this particular implementation, but consider the next incremental step for this same approach: a website where you upload a photo of anyone's face and get a map/trail of every public photo/video posted by someone else where that face appears in the background for the last month. Now you're not just finding the subject of a voluntarily portrait in security camera footage from a public place, but finding anywhere that any private person has gone in any populated area where anyone else is taking photos for social media.

How many involuntary social media photo and video backgrounds do you think someone living in NYC or SF is identifiable in every day? I would venture to guess, enough to track a lot of their life. The only thing I see stopping anyone from making this site today is the challenges in scraping large quantities of public data from social media sites. Once you have the data, the rest seems like a solved problem.