The Food and Drug Administration has canceled its policy of giving rubber-stamp approval to marketing of powerful new radiation therapy equipment like linear accelerators. From now on, the manufacturer of the machine is going to have to prove the equipment has proper safety checks to prevent dangerous overdoses of radiation to patients. The New York….
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FDA Has New Initiative on Excessive Radiation to Patients
The scandal about injuries to cancer patients from malpractice in radiation therapy has had one beneficial side effect: the Food and Drug Administration is gaining urgency and attention for its new initiative to reduce unnecessary radiation in diagnostic imaging of patients. Here is a link to the FDA’s White Paper on its steps to make….
Continue ReadingBetter Care with the Tried and True, or the Seduction of the New?
Time and again in U.S. health care, new technologies are hurried into wide use with little testing, scant training of their human operators, and lack of solid evidence that newer really is better. After the flush of optimism has faded, billions of dollars later, we learn how to judiciously use the new equipment, but only….
Continue ReadingPreventing Malpractice in Radiation Therapy
What can cancer patients do to protect themselves from malpractice in radiation therapy? This urgent question arises from a lengthy series of investigative reports in the New York Times. The articles exposed serious patient injuries that stem from therapists who are overwhelmed and inexperienced, lax regulation and indifference by hospital administrators. A key part of….
Continue ReadingNew Patient Safety Report Cards in Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania continues to lead the nation in showing how public health authorities can cast a little disinfecting sunshine onto the patient safety practices of hospitals. In its latest report, the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority says that in 2008, a total of 194 surgery patients were sewed up with a foreign object still inside them. They….
Continue ReadingDoes My Doctor Have a Conflict of Interest? Why You Should Care
Whether or not a patient should get an expensive imaging scan or some other elaborate and expensive test is not always clearcut. But what should be clearcut is that doctors should not have a thumb on the scale when they’re balancing harms versus benefits. The balancing ought to be focused entirely on what’s in the….
Continue ReadingThe Medical Industry’s Own “Steroids in Baseball” Scandal
Another reason for careful patients to be skeptical about overly hyped prescription drugs came this week with news about the extent to which articles in important medical journals are “ghost-written” by drug manufacturers. According to an article in the New York Times by Natasha Singer, newly released papers from lawsuits involving Wyeth’s hormone replacement drugs….
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