The headline is no joke. It’s what experts think is the explanation behind vision-ruining infections in the eye that happen occasionally with injections into the eye of a drug used to halt the progress of macular degeneration. As the thinking goes, if the doctor is talking during the time he or she is drawing the….
Continue ReadingArchives for October 2011
Doctors Say Patients Receive Too Much Care
The per-capita U.S. expenditure for health care is twice that of the average industrialized nation, and it’s growing at an undsustainable rate. One reason for that grim reality, says a survey of doctors in the Archives of Internal Medicine, is that a considerable amount of health care is unnecessary. Patients, they say, get too much….
Continue ReadingWhy Are the Feds Willing to Pay the Cost of Fraud?
Kathleen Sharp tells a good, if scary, story. In “Blood Feud: The Man Who Blew the Whistle on One of the Deadliest Prescription Drugs Ever,” she describes how two Big Pharma companies conspired to develop and market an anti-anemia drug despite evidence of devastating side effects. In a recent op-ed in the New York Times,….
Continue ReadingHow to Protect Against Listeria
At the end of last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 15 people had died and 84 were ill from eating listeria-contaminated cantaloupes. It’s the deadliest food-borne outbreak in 13 years. Listeria is a bacteria that causes listeriosis, a kind of food poisoning. Every year, according to WebMd, approximately 2,500 people….
Continue ReadingTwo Cancer Patients Walk Into a Bar…
Like cops, soldiers and other professionals regularly confronted with the specter of death, doctors sometimes relieve the stress of their reality through humor. How can a doctor, whose job is supposed to include the compassion of nonjudgment, laugh about your dread disease? While such behavior can be deplorable in the wrong setting, at the wrong….
Continue ReadingMore Bad News about All-Metal Hip Implants
All-metal hip implants are proving to be a brewing epidemic of injury to patients: the failure rate is much higher than metal-plus plastic or ceramic hip implants, and now, doctors are finding that the metallic debris from wear and tear incites an immune reaction from the body that causes tissue damage. When tiny fragments of….
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