A newly launched website tracks the complication rates of about 17,000 surgeons across the country. The idea is to help patients choose the person who’s going to operate on them based on his or her safety and performance records in comparison with their peers. The database, Surgeon Scorecard, was established by ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative….
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Research Your Doctor’s Payments from Drug and Device Makers
For patients in our home territory of the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia, here are some quick links to look up your doctor’s payments last year from manufacturers of drugs and medical devices. District of Columbia. Virginia Maryland This comes from the ProPublica database, which has obtained the numbers from the federal government in….
Continue ReadingWhy the CDC and the FDA Offer Different Advice About Flu Drugs
According to the best data scientists can get their hands on, antiviral drugs like Tamiflu can shorten your bout with the flu by maybe a day; maybe by only a few hours. So why does the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommend people with flu symptoms get a prescription for these expensive drugs?….
Continue ReadingDo People Die from Lack of Access to Regular Health Care?
The reflexive answer is, “Of course they do,” but proving it with hard numbers is another thing. And acting on it as national policy is yet another step. Now there’s an important study that puts hard numbers into the national debate about access to health care. When Massachusetts in 2006 became the first state to….
Continue ReadingMammograms Take Another Hit from Researchers
If regular mammograms really saved lives, they ought to show lower death rates in a big systematic study. But they didn’t, in the latest and biggest research study, published this week, on this once sacrosanct pillar of preventive medicine. The numbers say it all. Some 90,000 Canadian women were assigned by a coin flip into….
Continue ReadingEating Nuts and Plotting Forests
This week’s New England Journal of Medicine has a fascinating study that followed 115,000 health professionals for upwards of 30 years to see if regularly eating nuts – walnuts, peanuts and others – was associated with fewer deaths. The answer is “yes,” and you can read details from the source here. Today’s blog uses this….
Continue ReadingFear-Mongering Rears Its Head in Hotel Room Germ Study
When the media glommed onto a news release issued by the American Society for Microbiology last month, America responded with a collective “ewwww.” The study tallied the location and number of germs in the average hotel room. Researchers from the University of Houston concluded that the items most heavily contaminated with bacteria were television remotes,….
Continue ReadingMore Evidence that Throwing Bucks at Cancer May Not Improve Survival
A recent study published in Health Affairs either proves the superiority of U.S. medical care for cancer, or illustrates again how ignorance of basic statistical principles can lead to wrong conclusions. The study found that U.S. cancer patients who were diagnosed between 1995 and 1999 lived, on average, 11.1 years after their diagnosis. Similar patients….
Continue ReadingDoctors Often Misunderstand the Science Behind Screening Tests
Here’s another arrow in the quiver of patients well-armed against deficiencies in (well-meaning but often wrong) preventive medical care. A survey published in the Annals of Internal Medicine concluded that primary care doctors can be as confused as the rest of us when they ponder information about screening tests. “Most primary care physicians mistakenly interpreted….
Continue ReadingRobot Surgery of the Prostate: No Evidence of Better Outcomes for Patients
Surgery with the da Vinci robot to remove a cancerous prostate gland is guaranteed to dazzle the patient with the high-tech wizardry of it all. Problem is the outcomes in side effects that can disable men after prostate surgery — incontinence and sexual dysfunction — are no better than with conventional surgery. And the robot….
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