Life can be hard, lonely, and difficult for adults who must become caregivers for their parents. If that sounds like the challenging story for tens of millions of millennials and Gen-Xers, yes, it’s true. But Judith Graham, in a column for the Kaiser Health News Service, describes what may be an even tougher role for….
Continue ReadingArchives for August 2018
Can ‘sunshine’ of evidence-based facts dispel fog of diet and nutrition hokum?
Media coverage of diet and nutrition topics, for their abundance of hype and sheer bunk, may take the cake. Some recent, solid reports not only offer examples of the scope and scale of this public tomfoolery and its costs but also the reasons why it persists. Let’s start with reporter Liz Szabo’s deep, detailed take-down….
Continue ReadingSo, it’s true: Hospitals set steep surgery prices just by ‘spitballing’ costs
Hip and knee replacements have become some of the nation’s most commonly performed surgeries with hundreds of thousands of Americans, many of them older, having their knees or hips replaced with metal, plastic or ceramic each year. Uncle Sam’s Medicare program is paying around $7 billion annually for all this work. But here’s a nasty….
Continue ReadingAs Pharma beefs about testing, tougher comparative studies may be key
Big Pharma howls often about the federal Food and Drug Administration path to get prescription drugs approved for markets, complaining current regulatory processes take too long and, with their requirement for rigorous clinical trials, are too tough. Even as drug makers seem to be finding sympathetic officials to make these regimens faster and laxer, some….
Continue ReadingMillions of teens suffer concussions as experts link head trauma to suicide risk
Rigorous researchers avoid leaping to unfounded conclusions, but it’s hard not to look at two separate studies on areas of high current interest and just go “Hmmm ….” In the first work, experts from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed available reports and surveys to find that 15.1 percent of American high….
Continue ReadingDoctors and hospitals tussle over surgery for less-invasive heart valve repair
When big hospitals and their doctors jostle with competitors in smaller and medium-sized facilities over who gets to perform an important and booming kind of surgery, it’s not a pretty sight — nor might it be obvious with which institutions patients ought to side. Phil Galewitz of the independent, nonpartisan Kaiser Health News Service does….
Continue ReadingMaryland tragedy underscores need for tough safeguards for players’ health
In College Park, Md., new cooling tents have sprouted on the University of Maryland’s football practice field, where the training staff also is taking pains now to provide adequate cold drinks and breaks to players. Observers say the pre-season regimens, however, are not only marked by greater attentiveness to the young athletes’ needs, they’re also….
Continue ReadingDrug overdose toll hits another record as abusers fall prey to synthetic opioids
In 2017, drug overdoses killed 72,000 Americans, a 10 percent increase over 2016 and yet another record, according to the latest provisional federal estimates. That single year toll would be more than double the American deaths attributed to the Korean War, and almost 1.25 times those caused by the Vietnam War. The New York Times….
Continue ReadingA worthy campaign to prevent the daily toll of children dying from gunfire: ‘End Family Fire’
On the eighteenth day of the eighth month of the year 2018, can Americans be persuaded to start saving more youngsters’ lives — specifically, by preventing the eight children slain each day in a shooting or injury involving an improperly stored or misused gun found in the home? That’s the ambition of “End Family Fire,”….
Continue ReadingLax oversight and safety nightmares burgeon with boom in surgical centers
An innovation in medical treatment — which was supposed to offer more affordable, accessible, and even convenient care — instead may be getting swamped with safety problems that long have plagued hospitals and academic medical centers. USA Today and Kaiser Health News Service deserve credit for digging into patients’ nightmares with specialized surgical centers, not….
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