A laptop and a cardboard box. These two items could be major tools in improving regular folks’ health throughout this year — and beyond — if they get launched on important tasks, pronto. What needs to happen is for patients to be hyperconscious, persistent, and skeptical enough to start gathering vital records about themselves and….
Continue ReadingQuality outcome measures
Aching backs lead to dubious surgeries and billion$ in revenue$
As the nation rapidly grays, not only are middle-aged and older patients undergoing increasing numbers of knee, hip, ankle, and shoulder surgeries, back operations also have spiked — and a significant number of these procedures may be unwarranted and harmful. Spinal surgery is a booming business for orthopedic surgeons and hospitals, with Wall Street analysts….
Continue ReadingSpeedy OK of Alzheimer’s drug creates a big mess for patients and taxpayers
The federal Food and Drug Administration has created an instant medical and regulatory morass by giving an accelerated approval to Biogen’s costly prescription medication targeted at patients with Alzheimer’s disease. This is the first drug to win the precious official nod from the FDA in almost two decades. But the agency’s OK to market aducanumab….
Continue ReadingPandemic exposes how push for profits can imperil nursing home residents
Nursing home owners and operators have pleaded “poor us” through a lethal 2020. But profit-seeking players in the industry clearly still see rapacious opportunity in long-term care facilities — with residents suffering the consequences. NPR and the Washington Post both have dug into the results when investment groups or chains acquire and operate nursing homes,….
Continue ReadingWith speeding vaccine clinical trials, a pause that may prove reassuring
The “warp speed” race to develop a Covid-19 vaccine has gotten hit with a yellow flag. It could be a good thing that the product’s makers — Oxford University and AstraZeneca — followed medical-scientific protocols and paused their Phase III clinical trial due to a participant’s unexplained illness. Officially, the company offered spare information about….
Continue ReadingAs stakes soar for Covid-19 vaccine, concerns rise about this one big bet
As the novel coronavirus infections and deaths keep skyrocketing, Americans more and more have been forced into tough risk analyses, and frankly, too often thinking like gamblers. They are, for example, looking a lot at the much-promoted possibility of a Covid-19 vaccine in desperate poker ways — “betting on the come” and playing “river, river….
Continue ReadingWhy allow authoritarians to silence MDs and nurses in midst of health crisis?
Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin highlighted a crucial strength of the 16th U.S. president as he led the nation through one of its most divisive times: Abraham Lincoln encouraged dissent and welcomed opposing points of view, going so far as to appoint three better-known political rivals to top positions in his administration. That extraordinary lesson in….
Continue ReadingHaste to find disease remedies can lay waste to patient safety, history warns
Whoa, Nelly. For Americans stuffing their heads with vague data about potential drugs to treat Covid-19 — including chloroquine, hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, remdesivir, ritonavir, lopinavair, Actemra, Oseltamivir, Ribavirin, Umifenovir, interferon, baricitinib, imatinib, dasatinib, nitazoxanide, camostat mesylate, tocilizumab, sarilumab, bevacizumab, fingolimod, and eculizumab — let’s get a little perspective, please. Let’s put things simply, especially for most ordinary….
Continue ReadingU.S. is steering blindly due to dearth of desperately needed Covid-19 tests
Public health experts and many politicians agree that the pursuit of any next steps in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic will rely on testing, testing, testing. The nation will need significantly more tests, with faster and better results, that show who is infected now. Further, many, many more people will need to take blood antibody….
Continue ReadingWhat we know about Covid-19’s harms may help point out our next steps
With President Trump, members of his administration, and other politicians shoving back against public health officials’ recommendations on when to get Americans out of their homes and returning to work, the ultimate decision may be up to individuals: Do we give up the existing physical-distancing guidance? Or not? The data on Covid-19 infections and deaths….
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