Cortisone shots seem almost miraculous in their pain-banishing properties for sore tendons and joints. But a major new review article says they actually make tennis elbow worse and have long-term consequences when used for other tendon injuries too like Achilles tendon and sore shoulders. For tendonitis, especially, cortisone seems to change the short-term biology of….
Continue ReadingArchives for October 2010
Breast Cancer’s Scary but Fake Numbers
As we near the end of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, it’s time to speak the truth about how the cancer advocacy industry overly hypes and scares the American public about this disease. The much bandied number “one in eight” gives a good window into this. When I tuned in CBS 60 Minutes the other night,….
Continue ReadingDePuy Hip Recall Shows Need for Early Warning System on Defective Medical Devices, Drugs
Most consumers are shocked when they learn the reality of the early warning system for defective medical devices and drugs in the United States. Unlike Europe and most other advanced countries, there is no systematic, mandatory national registry of failures to provide an early warning system. Manufacturers are required to send to the FDA reports….
Continue ReadingAlarm sounded over drug-resistant bladder bacteria
Infectious disease specialists are raising the alarm over a variant of the e.coli bacteria that is resistant to most of the antibiotics used to treat bladder infections and could be responsible for more than 3,000 deaths a year. E.coli ST131, an aggressive strain of multi-drug-resistant e.coli bacteria, may be responsible for as many as 1….
Continue ReadingChamber of Commerce: Lawsuits Are for Us, Not for Regular People
Until a terrible injury happens to you or a family member because of someone else’s carelessness, you probably give little thought to the civil justice system that holds wrongdoers accountable in American courts. Except for a nagging thought that maybe there are a lot of frivolous lawsuits out there. That anti-lawsuit thought is planted in….
Continue ReadingFewer malpractice claims are being brought against hospitals
The frequency of malpractice claims against hospitals has declined slightly and the severity of those claims is leveling off, according to a report from Zurich, the insurance company. The fifth annual Zurich benchmarking report on claims trends in the healthcare industry, which collected data from 1,600 U.S. hospitals between 1997 and 2007, indicates that claims….
Continue ReadingSharing safety data among hospitals is shown to cut injury rate
Here’s a new research finding that is encouraging but discouraging at the same time for patient safety. After 16 Michigan hospitals began to share patient safety information, surgical complication rates dropped by nearly 10 percent, according to a recent study. That’s encouraging, of course. The disquieting piece is why it would take a major research….
Continue ReadingGetting the Best Health Care: Statisticians Are Our Friends
Today’s news has two reminders of why statisticians are our friends and allies when it comes to getting the right health care and avoiding dangerous and over-hyped treatments. The headlines: * Hormone replacement therapy after menopause not only increases the risk of getting breast cancer, but also makes the cancer more deadly. Details here. *….
Continue ReadingMalpractice in treating sepsis: Early aggressive care saves lives
There are no simple diagnostic tests for sepsis – an out-of-control reaction to infection that can start shutting down organs in mere hours – but there are warning signs if healthcare providers pay close enough attention, according to Dr. James O’Brien, a critical care specialist at Ohio State University Medical Center. “Minutes matter,” O’Brien says,….
Continue ReadingMost Published Research Findings Are Wrong
That’s the provocative headline on an article by an internationally regarded skeptic of medical research. And the striking thing is that many researchers agree their field is badly flawed. Dr. John Ioannidis bolstered his contention about the wrongness of most published research with an elaborate mathematical proof published in the on-line journal PLoS Medicine. Anyone….
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