Unless there’s a subpoena, no one may review your medical records except the practitioners who treat you and the facilities where they do it, the insurance company that covers you and hospital overseers charged with evaluating doctors’ competency. It’s federal law-the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Penalties for breaching medical record privacy are….
Continue ReadingArchives for January 2012
FDA Must Improve Monitoring of Food Safety
According to a report by the Department of Health and Human Services, every year 128,000 Americans are hospitalized and 3,000 die from food poisoning. The FDA is responsible for safeguarding the food supply and for inspecting food facilities. A recent study addressed concerns about the rigor of these inspections. As reported on the FDA Law….
Continue ReadingDoctors Consider the Cost of Effective, Appropriate Health Care
Somewhere between scary false terms such as “death panel,” voiced by opponents of the Obama administration’s health care reform (the Affordable Care Act, or ACA), and the truly scary increase in the cost of health care lies a reasoned, enlightened conversation about what is appropriate care, and what it costs. Often, the last people to….
Continue ReadingTwo Steps Forward, One Step Back for Patient Safety in Hospitals
There’s been a lot of good news lately about what hospitals are doing to protect patients: Many have improved their infection control practices, many are looking at the value of “hospitalists” (doctors who practice exclusively with inpatients) and many have embraced palliative care. Yet for every two steps forward for patient safety, it appears as….
Continue ReadingTobacco Industry Manipulates Study Results
In the latest edition of “will they ever learn,” tobacco industry studies conclude that additives such as menthol do not make cigarettes more toxic. Except, of course, they do. As reported on MedPage Today, more objective researchers-who had to sue for access to the industry studies in question-concluded that the smoke of cigarettes with flavor….
Continue ReadingRobot Surgery of the Prostate: No Evidence of Better Outcomes for Patients
Surgery with the da Vinci robot to remove a cancerous prostate gland is guaranteed to dazzle the patient with the high-tech wizardry of it all. Problem is the outcomes in side effects that can disable men after prostate surgery — incontinence and sexual dysfunction — are no better than with conventional surgery. And the robot….
Continue ReadingOne Surgeon’s Call for True Informed Consent
Approximately 40 million people undergo surgery every year. Writing on KevinMD.com, Dr. Paul Ruggieri asks: How many of those patients are informed of their surgeon’s track record? Not many, he surmises. In a refreshing post of what’s-good-for-the-goose-is-good-for-the-gander, Ruggieri, a surgeon, argues that unless patients have access to the same information about doctors that hospitals and….
Continue ReadingDocs Practice Cosmetic Surgery When They Don’t Know How
“Everyone’s a critic,” the saying goes. Applied to the practice of medicine, that sentiment might become “Everyone’s a cosmetic surgeon.” And unless someone is board-certified in plastic/cosmetic surgery, that’s a far more threatening reality than the mere annoyance of opinionated people who can’t refrain from spouting off. As reported in USA Today, only 21 states….
Continue ReadingUnnecessary Testing Happens When Doctors Own Medical Equipment
When a diagnostic test result is negative, usually it’s cause for relief. But when the preliminary results of a study showed that nearly 9 in 10 MRI scans were negative, eyebrows were raised. Not because the test results were questionable, but because of who owned the equipment used to conduct them. As described in a….
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