Dr. Gilbert Welch is a professor of medicine at Dartmouth who wrote “Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health,” a book we like a lot. As we noted in our blog “Overtested, Overtreated, Overcharged,” before he went to medical school, Welch majored in economics. He’s the perfect person to analyze the byzantine nature….
Continue ReadingArchives for July 2013
Q&A About Insurance Choices and Mandatory Coverage
Various provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) have been rolling out over the last couple years, but the big one-mandatory health insurance-comes in January. For people who don’t get coverage through their employers, Medicare or Medicaid, each state is establishing health insurances exchanges where people can compare plans and shop for coverage. The exchanges….
Continue ReadingVA Proves Fear of Malpractice Suits Isn’t Responsible for Overtesting
Malpractice lawsuits are routinely blamed for unnecessary medical practices, but a new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine supports the truth: Fear of lawsuits is just a noisy campaign to restrict patients’ rights and redress when they have been harmed. Among the interpreters of the JAMA article was Aboutlawsuits.com, which concluded that “The underlying culture….
Continue ReadingCDC Says Doctors Overprescribe Painkillers
It’s often a reflexive response: When we hurt, we take a pill for relief. Last week, Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said, essentially, we have gone too far. By “we,” he means patients and doctors. As described by the Los Angeles Times, Frieden criticized doctors for….
Continue ReadingToo Many Endoscopes Aren’t Disinfected Sufficiently
Awareness of how patients contract infections while in the hospital or in the course of invasive procedures is improving, as are measures to address them. (See our blog, “Controlling Staph Infections in the ICU”.) But a paper presented in June at the annual conference for the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC)….
Continue ReadingGender Matters in Virtual Colonoscopy
Good news for women on the colonoscopy front: A study published in the journal Cancer found that women can wait five to ten years longer than men to be screened for colorectal cancer if they undergo an initial virtual colonoscopy. As we blogged earlier this year, colonoscopy is an invasive procedure whose risks for many….
Continue ReadingDoctors Advocate for Doctor Drug and Alcohol Testing
Some professions require all job candidates to pass drug tests, and some employers subject employees to random testing. Three physicians have written a medical journal article, “Identification of Physician Impairment,” advocating that hospitals also randomly test physicians for drug and alcohol use. Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Julius Cuong Pham,….
Continue ReadingDeaths Prompt FDA Alert on Schizophrenia Drug
Anyone who takes or knows someone who takes the drug Zyprexa Relprevv to treat schizophrenia should know that the FDA has issued a safety alert and is investigating the cases of two schizophrenia patients who died after injecting the drug. Various versions of Zyprexa also are used to treat aggression, depression, manic episodes and bipolar….
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