Expectant parents have gotten an ugly exposure to a rapacious aspect of modern medicine: Over testing, over diagnosis, and over treatment, specifically with a new, fast-growing high-tech twist. The grownups — whether over-reaching to safeguard the unborn or in a simply silly way to determine the gender of their hoped-for bundle of joy — are….
Continue ReadingMisdiagnosis
Experts call for end to a race-based adjustment in a key kidney function test
Medical specialists and researchers have taken a big step in recognizing that how they diagnose black patients with kidney disease may be racially biased and harmful to a group that already and disproportionately suffers the illness’s harms. Doctors now should jettison race-based adjustments in equations used in a crucial and fundamental test to assess kidney….
Continue ReadingOnline portals let patients get their medical records. They’re full of errors, and patients can get them corrected.
As doctors and hospitals switch to electronic medical record systems and try to amp up the business efficiency of their enterprises by opening online consumer portals, more patients may access their caregivers’ files on them, including doctor notes that may be shocking in their inaccuracy. Heather Gantzer, a doctor practicing at Methodist Hospital in St…..
Continue ReadingNursing homes misdiagnose and sedate residents with strong drugs but lag on vaccinating staff
The nation’s nursing homes, battered by the coronavirus pandemic, are under more fire for their resurgent reliance on powerful and risky psychiatric drugs and shaky diagnoses of mental illness to treat elderly residents, as well as for the institutions’ inability to safeguard the old, sick, and injured in their care by ensuring their staff are….
Continue ReadingHigh-tech tools can boost blacks’ cancer warnings — and be racially biased
While technological advances may help provide crucial warnings to young men, especially those who are black, about their heightened risk of early-onset colorectal cancer, the rise of other high-tech diagnostic aids may only worsen built-in, harmful racial biases in an array of medical practices. Researchers at the University of Chicago, to their credit, have sought….
Continue ReadingHospitals called out for performing too many low-value tests and procedures
When it comes to hospitals performing low-value tests or procedures and putting older patients at increased risk, Dixie may have little to whistle about. The Lown Institute, a respected and nonpartisan think tank that says it “believes a radically better American health system is possible,” has published a new hospital index that puts dozens of….
Continue ReadingPanicked over prediabetes? For older patients, more evidence to say: Not to worry
It’s not an invitation to pile on the ice cream, cake, and candy. But older adults may get to say pshaw to the finger-wagging they may have endured from doctors and loved ones about their raised blood sugar levels and the condition that specialists ginned up to caution them about it: prediabetes. As the New….
Continue ReadingPatients finally gaining new access to medical records and doctors’ notes
Millions of Americans may be finding that their doctors routinely refer to them with terms like SOB and BS. But patients will be better off with this knowledge, once they learn how to translate medical abbreviations. The Associated Press reported that hospitals and health care systems nationwide quietly are complying with deadlines, and, under a….
Continue ReadingColorectal screening may need to start at age 45, U.S. panel advises
An important federal advisory group has joined with medical specialists in recommending a change in the age at which patients should start screening for colorectal cancer, to age 45 and not the current 50 years old. Earlier detection of bowel issues could save lives, the U.S. Protective Services Task Force (USPSTF) has decided, with the….
Continue ReadingVirginia gynecologist’s fraud trial surfaces hundreds of mistreatment claims
A Virginia criminal case, while focusing on claims of fraud against the federal government, also has exposed a long-running and nightmarish pattern of what prosecutors assert has been a Chesapeake gynecologist’s rampant mistreatment of his patients, many of them women of color and poor. Dr. Javaid Perwaiz is on trial because authorities say he “manipulated….
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