A major health maintenance organization says it wants to start its own medical school. Will this change the culture of medical education for the better? The need is definitely there, as young doctors increasingly report burnout from the medieval training practices they experience. Whether the HMO’s approach is the cure, though, remains to be seen. Kaiser Permanente, an….
Continue ReadingArchives for December 2015
As exam device turned deadly, its maker went silent. Where were regulators?
Twenty-one patients died and at least two dozen others fell ill from infections now linked to a flexible, state-of-the-art scope used in gastrointestinal examinations, even as the medical device’s manufacturer for years kept selling the instrument and failed to alert hospitals about growing dangers, the Los Angeles Times has reported. The paper detailed its findings….
Continue ReadingA sick use of cellphone pics, social media: staffers’ abuse of aged patients
Not all care-giving positions carry high status or lavish compensation. Still, why would anyone take on any health care work lacking basic common sense and the tiniest bit of compassion? That’s what you might be asking after the latest head-shaking reporting about invasions of patients’ privacy: Pro Publica’s Charles Ornstein has found at least three….
Continue ReadingNation’s capital ends the year with a big, needed funding boost for health care
Before they headed off to their holidays, Congress and President Obama wrapped up what many hope will be a helpful fiscal package to benefit Americans’ health: The 2016 omnibus budget bill, which got so much attention, also provided some of the strongest health care funding in more than a dozen years, news reports say. This….
Continue ReadingThere’s a healthy reason to celebrate the old during the holidays
When it comes to aging and doing well, a positive attitude matters. In fact, those who hold negative views of aging and the elderly may be exposing themselves to a self-fulfilling prophecy. As they describe it in the journal Psychology and Aging, researchers from the National Institutes of Health, Yale, and Johns Hopkins studied a unique….
Continue ReadingA warning for holiday travelers to tropical respites
Here’s a buzz-kill alert: Although I’m wishing all the very best for the season, for those headed to vacation in sunny, tropical climes, I’m also hoping to put a tiny bug in your ear — be aware of local health conditions and protect yourself from tiny nipping critters, because tropical diseases continue to surge in….
Continue ReadingAt least 1,000 patients died in U.S. dental care in last 5 years
Let the patient beware is an adage that may need to be extended to yet another realm of healthcare: dentistry. Kudos to a reporting team in Texas for their recently published investigation, disclosing that dentists all too frequently are involved in procedures in which their patients die and that ineffectual regulators fail to halt dodgy….
Continue ReadingWhat if 100,000 more lives each year could be saved from cancer? And at what risk?
If 100,000 more Americans could be saved from cancer each year, just how much leeway would the public give physicians in providing cutting-edge, promising care? That’s the intriguing premise of a New Yorker piece by noted writer Malcolm Gladwell, examining a new book by Vincent T. DeVita Jr., an eminent but controversial cancer clinician-researcher. The….
Continue ReadingU.S. must crack down on small but hugely painful patient privacy breaches
Although Americans may live in dread about large-scale data breaches by big corporations, instances in which health care personnel inappropriately peek and tell information from patients’ private medical records can be equally daunting and destructive, a fine, recent journalistic dissection discloses. As ProPublica reporter Charles Ornstein also finds, it may take lawsuits and the civil….
Continue ReadingWhy are MDs still prescribing off-label powerful anti-psychotics for tots?
Inexplicable. Unfathomable. It’s tempting to reach for the thesaurus to describe the umbrage deserved for the muddle-headed decision by all too many doctors in prescribing powerful anti-psychotic drugs to patients younger than two, a practice that jumped by 50 percent from 2013 to 2014. Physicians dispensed 20,000 scripts to parents so their tots could take Risperdal….
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