Let’s flip the script on those who have rejected their role in quelling the pandemic and demanded their right to control their own bodies. It’s time to recapture common sense. Those who have advocated for increasingly unmoored and unfounded responses to the pandemic can’t stigmatize, criticize, mock, or abuse (physically or verbally) those who want….
Continue ReadingHospitals
Experts still tussle with proper prescribing of opioid painkillers
As the opioid abuse and drug overdose crisis rages, experts — after decades now of experience with powerful painkillers — continue to struggle with their proper handling and prescribing. The federal Centers for Disease Control, on the one hand, has softened its earlier tough guidelines on the medications, while a top government commission assailed the….
Continue ReadingUCLA pays $243 million more for gynecologist’s sexual wrongdoing
The City of Angels has become an epicenter of big settlements paid to women harmed by doctors in university health care systems. The University of California at Los Angeles disclosed that it will pay $243 million to 203 patients who asserted they were sexually mistreated by James Heaps, a gynecologist who was affiliated with the….
Continue ReadingIn U.S. health care, the relentless pursuit of sky-high profits goes on
While the folks who toil in the front lines of U.S. health care deserve the highest praise and support in the continuing battle against the coronavirus pandemic, those who run care systems deserve a Bronx cheer and worse for their rapacious pursuit of profits — at the expense of patients: Just consider how health systems….
Continue ReadingJust ‘live with it’? U.S. pandemic deaths hit 900,000-plus and rising …
The coronavirus pandemic, which has confounded medical experts and their efforts to quell it, also has created a baffling assault on reality by a large segment of U.S. society. The evidence-free opponents of vaccines, face coverings, social distancing, and other common sense public health measures are gaining a growing new coterie of off-kilter advocates. The….
Continue ReadingDeaths no longer a lagging indicator of Omicron variant’s grim toll
The lethal toll of the latest Omicron surge in the coronavirus pandemic lags no more. But even as overwhelmed doctors, nurses, hospitals, and clinics record new highs in disease deaths (see chart, courtesy the New York Times), exceeding some of the worst daily fatality numbers in what has become the planet’s worst public health crisis….
Continue ReadingFinancial tangles can trap poorer residents in costly nursing homes
As experts drill down to discover why nursing homes and other long-term care facilities are not playing a vital role in the U.S. health system by admitting improving patients from costly care in overwhelmed hospitals, a disconcerting explanation is emerging on who is filling some of the invaluable institutional space. They might be called system….
Continue ReadingAs Omicron rips through hospitals, new governor lifts Virginia pandemic measures
Gov. Glenn Youngkin has thrust Virginia into the ferocious battles over evidence-based efforts to quell the coronavirus pandemic, with the newly installed Republican issuing executive orders to bar schools from requiring face coverings and forbidding state employers from having vaccine requirements. His decisions, in keeping with what has become a GOP policy orthodoxy and reversing….
Continue ReadingBone and joint surgery? Consider other options too
Even as patients in a giant and rapidly graying generation throng orthopedic surgeons’ offices seeking relief from aging’s pain and discomfort, the evidence for these pricey and invasive medical interventions is slim at best and too often is simply unpersuasive. Those are the findings of an expansive, rigorous “meta examination” of major medical databases and….
Continue ReadingMedicare curbs Alzheimer’s drug coverage, fueling regulatory turmoil
As the nomination of Dr. Robert Califf to head the federal Food and Drug Administration advances, he and the agency already are confronting a major regulatory crisis over Aduhelm, a prescription drug targeted for Alzheimer’s treatment and approved on the thinnest of evidence. An FDA sister agency, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS),….
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