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….
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Half of those hurt or killed in crashes used drugs or alcohol
As federal, state, and local officials seek to slash the nation’s spiking road toll of injury and death, law enforcement authorities need to crack down on the scary prevalence of motorists who get behind the wheel while intoxicated by marijuana or alcohol. Indeed, as NPR reported: “A large study by U.S. highway safety regulators found….
Continue ReadingIn hospitals’ struggles with staffing crises, lessons on reaping and sowing
Big hospitals and hospital chains have wailed, with considerable justification, since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic about financial damages they have suffered due to costly shortages of desperately needed health staff. But the institutions fostered this staffing crisis, with profit-ravenous suits in executive suites boosting hospital bottom lines in flusher times by slashing one….
Continue ReadingMisdiagnoses lead to 250,000 ER patients’ deaths annually, U.S. study finds
Doctors working in hospital emergency departments face chaos, violence and high stress every day, and usually they get the diagnosis and treatment right. But, and it’s a big but, as often as one in seventeen ER visits ends with a misdiagnosis, which can have deadly consequences. Those medical misdiagnosis are newly estimated by Johns Hopkins….
Continue ReadingA holiday health warning to take to heart about drinking
Cardiologists and other doctors have words to the wise for the aging, party-hearty-for-the-holidays crowd: Excessive boozing, as part of their seasonal merry making, puts those who partake of too much liquid cheer at heightened risk of heart problems. The last thing, too, that public safety advocates would want to see in times when the nation….
Continue ReadingWatchdog agency taking fire for big problems safeguarding food and drugs
In regular places, when alarms blare and it becomes clear that a big, important something is broken and threatens folks’ well-being, those with common sense race to make needed fixes. Washington, D.C., is different. And members of Congress, the White House, and top federal bureaucrats already may be dodging a desperately needed reckoning for the….
Continue ReadingWhile surgeons operate often on the elderly, studies are just starting to detail the risks
Seniors and their loved ones should take note of new and increasing data that researchers are developing about the risks undertaken by elderly patients who choose to undergo significant surgeries — procedures that make up a little less than half of costly operations performed in this country. The numbers about invasive medical work can be….
Continue ReadingBotched. Belabored. Enough already. Fix the FDA and Philips recall
While critics long have ripped the Food and Drug Administration for its weak oversight of medical devices and its too cozy relationships with their makers, the federal agency and a Dutch global conglomerate have given millions of U.S. consumers a big, infuriating, prolonged exposure to just how bungled the oversight of this industry can be…..
Continue ReadingPandemic and respiratory ills are taking a broad and terrible toll
The coronavirus pandemic may not hold the iron grip it once held on newspaper front pages and lead stories on broadcast and online news outlets. The infection, however, keeps inflicting major harms — taking a disproportionate and lethal toll now on older Americans, wreaking sustained havoc on the credibility of public health information and medical….
Continue ReadingAs STD epidemic rages, the sexually active scorn a familiar protection
In some not-so-great news for the nation’s sexual well-being, the rubber has hit the road for too many guys. The familiar and oft-ridiculed prophylactic could play a significant role in battling an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) that has engulfed the nation, the Washington Post reported. But condom use has declined significantly, for example,….
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