Although many sports enthusiasts relish the summer as a peak time to train hard to get especially fit, wise athletes for safety’s sake may wish to build their way up to exhausting workouts, and to ensure they’re staying hydrated in healthful ways, while also recognizing that endurance competitions may alter their bodies in ways that….
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Where you live may have major effects on your health: Here are four examples
Although Americans may like to think that it doesn’t or shouldn’t matter as much as it does, where they live can have major effects on their health. Geography isn’t an absolute determinant, but key differences have been discerned in how it affects the prescribing dangerous opioid drugs, cancer death rates, some air pollution harms, and….
Continue ReadingWisconsin appeals court rejects legal changes that GOP seeks nationally
Even as congressional Republicans advance their counter-factual campaign to strip patients who have been harmed while seeking medical services of their rights to seek legal redress, another state appeals court has rejected key GOP arguments about medical malpractice lawsuits. An appellate court in Wisconsin has declared unconstitutional that state’s $750,000 cap on non-economic damages, reinstating a….
Continue ReadingAs opioid drug toll soars, experts zero in on abusers’ mental illnesses, too
Taken from a most favorable point of view, Big Pharma and doctors tried to address a big physical problem for patients when they pushed ahead in recent years with potent painkillers. But now, it’s those troubled Americans’ mental health woes that officials may need to deal with to better battle what has become an epidemic….
Continue ReadingFDA can’t ignore oversight of drugs, medical devices once on the market
Big Pharma and medical device makers have opened their wallets for a 2017 lobbying spree, throwing tens of millions of dollars around the nation’s capital, including to campaign with lawmakers and regulators to defend their soaring prices and to speed the path for their products to get to markets. But credit’s due to officials and….
Continue ReadingOhio sues Big Pharma firms over harms of opioid drug abuse epidemic
With more than 4,000 overdose deaths last year alone and a fifth of its residents having received prescriptions for powerful painkillers, the state of Ohio has sued five Big Pharma companies, accusing them of mispresenting opioid drugs’ risks and fueling the medications’ epidemic abuse. Ohio joins Mississippi in suing makers of increasingly lethal drugs like….
Continue ReadingA gut check on lap-band surgery, women’s mistreatment in medicine
They once got a ton of hype with radio, TV, and print ads, as well as billboard campaigns by proponents who later proved to be nothing less than sketchy. But the much-touted lap-band weight surgeries have fallen out of favor. The number of the procedures performed annually has nose-dived. Researchers, based on a longer view,….
Continue ReadingCongress boosts NIH funding but CDC, drug czar’s office aren’t faring as well
Although its battles over health insurance have dominated the headlines, Congress also provided a glimmer of good news on funding for medical research. Lawmakers, at least for this fiscal year, shunned President Trump’s request to slash the budget of the National Institutes of Health. Instead of giving it the billion-dollar haircut the Administration sought, Congress….
Continue ReadingThere may be no place like home after joint replacements
Hip and knee replacements, especially among seniors, have become so prevalent that almost 7 million Americans by 2010 had undergone the surgeries. With the cost to Medicare of knee replacements running between $16,500 and $33,000, and with roughly half of the procedures’ expense occurring post-operatively, there’s some good news for patients on saving money—and staying….
Continue ReadingFDA warns against giving kids two potent painkillers: codeine, tramadol
When severe colds, flu, or other infections run down youngsters with bad aches or an unrelenting hack, worried parents and doctors may turn to potent painkillers and cough suppressants. But the federal Food and Drug Administration has issued its strongest warnings about key ingredients in some of these, saying kids should not receive medications containing….
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