Soaring medical costs are bad for our economic health, so why isn’t someone doing more about them? There’s a reason, hiding in plain sight, contends Chad Terhune, a seasoned health care journalist. He wrote a revealing Op-Ed in the New York Times, pointing out that 1 in 9 Americans now works in health care, up….
Continue ReadingArchives for April 2017
Teens need more help with school schedules, the law, pregnancy prevention
There may be more science and policy impact than many parents, teachers, and coaches realize when they joke that teen-agers can be so slow to mature now they’re almost like aliens. Young people, in fact, may need distinctive school schedules, courts, and reproductive awareness programs—all based on building research about adolescent brain and body development…..
Continue ReadingFDA warns against giving kids two potent painkillers: codeine, tramadol
When severe colds, flu, or other infections run down youngsters with bad aches or an unrelenting hack, worried parents and doctors may turn to potent painkillers and cough suppressants. But the federal Food and Drug Administration has issued its strongest warnings about key ingredients in some of these, saying kids should not receive medications containing….
Continue ReadingEconomists’ Rx for MDs’ legal wellbeing? Practice better medicine
In the battles between lawyers and doctors over malpractice lawsuits filed by patients harmed while seeking medical services, it may be worth heeding economists’ prescription for caregivers: Physicians, heal thy selves. Aaron Carroll, a pediatrician and health policy expert at Indiana University, has written in the “Upshot” column of the New York Times that research….
Continue ReadingCongress returns with Trump pressing anew for ACA repeal/replace, but with what?
Welcome back, Republicans in Congress. When you went home for spring break, constituents made raucous complaints, if you held town halls, about the GOP’s failure to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. The party’s substitute, the American Health Care Act, aka Trumpcare, grows more unpopular by the day, opposed 56 percent to….
Continue ReadingVitamin D is the new poster child of excess testing and treatment
The health care pendulum appears to have taken a bad swing to the extreme with vitamin D. Too many Americans may be taking unnecessary tests to see if they’re deficient of this important nutrient. Too many of us are taking unneeded amounts of it. Federal experts report that blood tests for vitamin D among Medicare….
Continue ReadingPSA test gets a new grade: a gentleman’s C
A burst of bad headlines and not so great news reports may have confused some men. But to put it in lay terms: The use of the common test for routine prostate cancer screening got a dim grade of C for many men, up from a dismal D, in a re-evaluation by independent experts who….
Continue ReadingFDA rebukes heart device maker, even as agency’s oversight raises questions
The serious, slowly disclosed problems of a manufacturer and its implanted heart defibrillators may offer more needed cautions to Food and Drug Administration critics who want regulators to rush the oversight of drug and medical device makers and make the agency more welcoming to big business. St. Jude Medical, the New York Times has reported,….
Continue ReadingHospital safety and access are still big problems
Hospitals can be risky, troubled, and even downright scary spots, as some recent news and other reports indicate: Inspector general slams DC VA Medical Center Almost 100,000 patients of the VA Medical Center in Washington, D.C., have been put at unnecessary risk because hospital staff and administrators, a government watchdog said, failed to “ensure that….
Continue ReadingFamilies turn to courts to protect difficult end-of-life choices
Many hospitals and doctors rightly have campaigned to get more patients to provide information in advance about their end-of-life care choices, but doesn’t that mean that the choices when made should be respected? And if they’re not, what role do the courts have? Paula Span, a New York Times columnist who writes on aging issues,….
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