Big hospitals keep getting bigger. But, contrary to what the suit-wearing MBAs may claim, the rising number of institutional mergers and acquisitions isn’t necessarily better for patients and their care. At hospitals subjected to corporate wheeling and dealing, the quality of care got worse, or, at best, it stayed the same and didn’t improve, a….
Continue ReadingMedical Error
A patient’s painful and powerful reminder of harms inflicted by drug diversions
Hospitals, clinics, and other health care settings — and those who staff them — aren’t immune to the ravages of the opioid crisis and its related abuse of prescription and illicit drugs. For patients, their caregivers’ addictions can have serious consequences, including a less-discussed nightmare: diversions of their drugs. Lauren Lollini, a psychotherapist and a….
Continue ReadingHospitals’ preventable patient deaths add to big concerns in mental health care
With mental health services stretched thin and failing to fill significant need, it may be more distressing still for the public to confront growing evidence of big problems in existing facilities that try to treat those with serious psychiatric ills. The Los Angeles Times, based on its investigation, has found “nearly 100 preventable deaths over….
Continue ReadingIgnore doctors’ malpractice claims history? The U.S. did. 66 patients died. It cost $55 million.
Although doctors, hospitals, and insurers may howl about the professional harms they claim to suffer due to medical malpractice lawsuits, research studies show that it’s just a tiny slice of MDs who lose in court and must pay up for injuring patients. Further, the data show that the problem few doctors don’t rack up one,….
Continue Reading13 million and one reasons why simultaneous operations should be barred
A big Boston hospital has offered 13 million and one ways to try to make good with a former orthopedic surgeon who assailed the respected institution and colleagues for performing simultaneous operations in which doctors went from suite to suite, working for hours on multiple patients at once. Massachusetts General Hospital insisted this practice was….
Continue ReadingU.S. task force refines guidelines for women’s genetic cancer screening
Many more women would benefit if their doctors took time to put them through a relatively easy screening using readily available questionnaires to determine if they might need further specialist assessment and a medical test for a genetic mutation linked to breast and other forms of cancer. Women, however, should not routinely be subjected to….
Continue ReadingDo health care’s perverse incentives lure MDs into deliberate misdiagnosis for profit?
When doctors become medical outliers, shouldn’t hospitals, colleagues, insurers, and the rest of us ask how and why an individual practitioner diverges so much from the way others provide care? Olga Khazan details for the Atlantic magazine the disturbing charges involving Yasser Awaad, a pediatric neurologist at a hospital in Dearborn, Mich. As she describes….
Continue ReadingLoneliness, debilitation, and depression blamed for seniors’ rising suicides
The nation’s rising suicide crisis torments seniors, too, with just under one out of five such deaths in 2017 occurring with individuals 65 and older. Men 65-plus, experts say, face the highest suicide risk, while seniors 85 and older, men and women, rank No. 2 in groups most likely to die by taking their own….
Continue ReadingDefense bill may offer active service personnel a way to win back key rights
Although members of Congress have fled the nation’s capital for their annual August recess, there’s guarded optimism that lawmakers may be open to reversing a seven-decades-old U.S. Supreme Court ruling that bars active duty military personnel from their constitutional right to pursue in the civil justice system claims that they have suffered harms while seeking….
Continue ReadingFor patients facing high-risk operations, an alarm on hospital surgical volumes
Would a major league baseball team start a pitcher who played only once in the season for the deciding game of the World Series? Would passengers want to be aboard a jet whose pilot flew just once a year? Would any high-end sports car owner let a mechanic under the vehicle’s hood if she fixed….
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