A REMEDY WORSE THAN THE DISEASE

A cure worse than the disease.

The pending challenge to section 5 of the Voting Rights Act insists the statute is no longer necessary. Should the Supreme Court agree, its ruling is likely to reflect the belief that section 5 is not only obsolete but that its requirements do more harm today than the condition it was crafted to address. In this Essay, Professor Ellen D. Katz examines why the Court might liken section 5 to a de...

Maintenance antipsychotic therapy: is the cure worse than the disease?

The serious long-term complications of maintenance antipsychotic therapy led the authors to undertake a critical review of outpatient withdrawal studies. Key findings included the following: 1) for a least 40% of outpatient schizophrenics, drugs seem to be essential for survival in the community; 2) the majority of patients who relapse after drug withdrawal recompensate fairly rapidly upon rein...

Dofetilide: is the treatment worse than the disease?

On October 1, 1999, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved dofetilide (Tikosyn) for the treatment of persistent (nonparoxysmal) atrial fibrillation and flutter. However, the FDA cautioned: “Because Tikosyn can cause life-threatening ventricular arrhythmias, it should be reserved for patients in whom atrial fibrillation/flutter is highly symptomatic (1).” Dofetilide is the first ne...

Failure Recovery: When the Cure Is Worse Than the Disease

Cloud services inevitably fail: machines lose power, networks become disconnected, pesky software bugs cause sporadic crashes, and so on. Unfortunately, failure recovery itself is often faulty; e.g. recovery can accidentally recursively replicate small failures to other machines until the entire cloud service fails in a catastrophic outage, amplifying a small cold into a contagious deadly plagu...

Quinidine. Worse than adverse?