Tag Archives: health care

Austin Frakt via www.nytimes.com Can machines outperform doctors? Not yet. But in some areas of medicine, they can make the care doctors deliver better. Humans repeatedly fail where computers — or humans behaving a little bit more like computers — can help. Even doctors, some of the smartest and best-trained professionals, …

Dan Mangan via www.cnbc.com Primary care doctors are the first line of defense in the American health-care system. But a new report suggests that many of them feel they aren’t equipped to handle their most challenging patients. Up to one in four U.S. primary care doctors believe their practices aren’t well …

Patti Neighmond via www.npr.org On any given day, about half a million children are living in foster care. They’ve been removed from violent or abusive households; many suffer physical and mental health problems that have gone untreated. Their need is acute but the response is often dangerously slow, according to a …

Catharine Paddock PhD www.medicalnewstoday.com A study that successfully differentiated patients with pancreatic cancer from those with another pancreatic disease using a new biomarker, could lead to a blood test that detects pancreatic cancer early enough for curative surgery to be feasible. Pancreatic cancer has a very poor survival rate and ranks …

www.news-medical.net Contributor: Marissa Garey According to the Ambulatory Surgical Center of America (ASCOA), more than 60% of Americans would like their end-of-life preferences to be followed. Yet, granting this wish is difficult when the patient is unresponsive. While this topic is quite controversial, surrogates tend to seek guidance from a …

By Zack Budryk Contributor: Marissa Garey Through the year 2022, employment is predicted to augment, particularly in the healthcare industry. Health-support occupations, such as nurse practitioners and physicians, will be in constant demand, consequently improving job security. The recovery of the country’s labor market brought about 217,000 job opportunities by May …

Should old doctors be forced to retire? There is controversy regarding aging practitioners. It is questioned whether or not older physicians are capable of contributing to the overall goal of successfully meeting health demands. Regardless of age, physicians are held to high expectations: impressive education, current knowledge, and competency to …

LISA ALIFERIS www.npr.org As more and more parents choose to skip vaccinations for their children, public health professionals and researchers have been looking at new ways to ease the concerns of parents who are hesitant. But that turns out to be tough to do. Studies have found that simply educating …

www.physiciansweekly.com Now I’m really worried about surgical education. Here’s why: A friend told me that a new attending on his staff was having some problems. Although the young surgeon was a graduate of 5 years of general surgery plus 2 years of fellowship, he was unable to do an inguinal …

www.post-gazette.com A troubling case before the state Supreme Court asks if parents can sue their doctor for not telling them about a fetus’ birth defects. An auxiliary issue is whether doctors have an obligation to disclose to patients the negative outcome of an examination or test. Presumably, ethics would demand …

TARA HAELLE www.npr.org Sometimes a story takes odd turns as you report it. Every once in while it goes off the rails. That’s what happened as I reported on a new study purporting to explain how a childhood vaccine helps prevent leukemia. The experience reaffirmed the lessons I’ve learned in …

By Philip Zazove www.cnn.com When I was 4 years old, my mother and father received devastating news — I was deaf. It was the 1950s, a time when people with disabilities received few accommodations or support. A time long before any legislation like the Americans with Disabilities Act was conceived, …

By Melanie Tucker www.thedailytimes.com How long is 45 minutes? If you’re stuck standing in line at the bank or waiting for your meal at a restaurant, 45 minutes can seem like forever, each moment drawing out like an eternity. But, in the grand scheme of life, 45 minutes is almost …

CHRISTINA FARR www.npr.org How can you tell ­the difference between a good surgeon and an exceptional one? You could start by looking for the one who has the rare ability to visualize a human organ in three dimensions from little more than a scan. “The handful of the top surgeons …

Salynn Boyles www.healthleadersmedia.com In-hospital outcomes among patients undergoing CAS in the US varied fourfold after adjusting for differences in patient risk factors in an analysis of data from a large, nationwide stenting registry. From MedPage Today. In-hospital outcomes among patients undergoing carotid artery stenting (CAS) in the U.S. varied fourfold after …

JAY HANCOCK NPR In the late 1990s you could have taken what hospitals charged to administer inpatient chemotherapy and bought a Ford Escort econobox. Today, average charges for chemo, not even counting the price of the anti-cancer drugs, are enough to pay for a Lexus GX sport-utility vehicle. Hospital prices …

Alexandra Wilson Pecci http://healthleadersmedia.com Researchers find a “very strong relationship between [physician] satisfaction and burnout and the leadership behaviors of physician supervisors” in large healthcare organizations. Physician burnout is prevalent throughout the U.S. healthcare system—experienced by nearly half (46%) of physicians, according to data published in JAMA last year. But effective leadership …

Richard Harris www.npr.org If you ran down the list of ailments that most commonly kill Americans, chances are you wouldn’t think to name sepsis. But this condition, sometimes called blood poisoning, is in fact one of the most common causes of death in the hospital, killing more people than breast …

www.cbsnews.com Virtual reality headsets are already revolutionizing the way people experience video games: put on a pair of goggles and you can travel anywhere from outerspace to the battlefield. But gamers aren’t the only ones this technology can transport to new worlds, reports CBS News’ Kara Finnstrom, only on “CBS …

By RONI CARYN RABIN www.nytimes.com When a new contraceptive implant came on the market over a decade ago, it was considered a breakthrough for women who did not want to have more children, a sterilization procedure that could be done in a doctor’s office in just 10 minutes. Now, 13 years …

Scott Mace www.healthleadersmedia.com Virtual care is not a new idea. Videoconferencing dates back several decades. Remote monitoring in ICUs began more than a decade ago. Telestroke and remote behavioral health programs have been on the radar in many settings for years. But two major factors have given virtual care a …

PONCIE RUTSCH www.npr.org If you need to see a urologist, the odds are very good that your doctor will be a man. Only about 8 percent of the practicing urologists are female, according to a poll from WebMD that includes gender distribution among medical specialties. The fact that there are …

  Erika Fry fortune.com Bernard J. Tyson, chairman and chief executive of Kaiser Permanente—the $56 billion non-profit health insurer and hospital operator—is more optimistic about America’s healthcare system than he’s ever been. That’s saying something, given that the fate of the Affordable Care Act hangs in the balance pending a …

DANIELLE VENTON www.wired.com IN RWANDA, PEOPLE have to deal with all kinds of threats to their health: malaria, HIV/AIDS, severe diarrhea. But in late 2012, Agnes Binagwaho, Rwanda’s Minister of Health, realized her country’s key health enemy was  something far more innocuous. The thing causing the most harm to her people, the leading …

BY MAGGIE FOX www.nbcnews.com Scientists have formulated a needle-free vaccine against measles and say the little stick-on patch could be the answer to fighting measles — and perhaps other diseases such as polio, too. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls the patch a “game-changer” and is helping the team at Georgia …

By DANIELA J. LAMAS, M.D. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com When Martin Fernandez came into Mount Sinai Hospital’s emergency room one recent afternoon, with high fever and excruciating abdominal pain, he and his family were asked an unexpected question. Mr. Fernandez, 82, would have to be officially admitted to receive intravenous antibiotics for his urinary …

JOHN HENNING SCHUMANN www.npr.org  Poor old Dr. Krebs. His painstaking Nobel-winning work on cellular metabolism, called the Krebs cycle, has made him the symbol for what’s ailing medical education. “Why do I need to know this stuff?” medical students ask me. “How many times have you used the Krebs Cycle lately?” senior doctors jokingly …

Linda Girgis, MD www.physiciansweekly.com Since entering medical school, I wished to be a pediatrician. There was nothing more noble in my mind than curing sick children and babies. That dream changed suddenly one night on my surgery rotation. It was early evening, when a Code-22 rang out over the hospital …

Dan Diamond www.forbes.com Americans want a lot from our doctors. We want caring bedside manner, effective communication, up-to-date knowledge, and finely honed clinical skills. We ideally want more than five minutes to spare in a visit. We want doctors who treat the whole person, not just the illness; doctors who …

Emily Hause www.medschoolpulse.com Hello my diverse readers! When I applied to medical school, I had this idea in my mind that there was some sort of perfect pre-med applicant prototype that schools had in mind. All I had to do to be accepted was become or fit into that perfect pre-med mold. …

By Aleksandr Peterso www.physiciansnews.com Wearable tech has painted itself as the future of innovation for many different industries, but perhaps most notably for healthcare. Even now, wearable devices are seeing increased use at care facilities to track patient status, reduce response times, and improve care coordination. But wearable technology is still …

ROB STEIN www.npr.org It’s another busy morning at Dr. Anthony Aurigemma’s homeopathy practice in Bethesda, Md. Wendy Resnick, 58, is here because she’s suffering from a nasty bout of laryngitis. “I don’t feel great,” she says. “I don’t feel myself.” Resnick, who lives in Millersville, Md., has been seeing Aurigemma for years …

By Joseph Conn www.modernhealthcare.com After years of saddling their customers and outside firms with substantial fees for interfaces and other costs for interoperability, vendors of electronic health-record systems are now engaged in what looks like an interoperability price war. The federal government probably had something to do with it, after firing …

MAANVI SINGH   www.npr.org Dana Lam was insured under her parent’s health plan until the end of 2014, thanks to a provision of the Affordable Care Act that allows young adults to stay on family health insurance until they turn 26. The arrangement worked out well until she needed treatment …

By KATIE THOMAS and REED ABELSON www.nytimes.com Dr. Robert Wergin, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, made little effort to contain his glee Wednesday over the news that Congress had voted to end a reviled payment system for doctors, simultaneously averting a 21 percent physician pay cut and overhauling the way Medicare will pay doctors in …

Bruce Davis, MD www.physiciansweekly.com There was a time, during my training and early in my career when the trauma surgeon was the fighter pilot of the surgical world. We were the Top Knives, the Master Surgeons, of our respective hospitals. Certainly the surgeons who trained me in the craft embodied …

By Sean West www.fiercehealthcare.com Increased demand for services will only exacerbate the problems expected by the shortage of close to 90,000 physicians in the next 10 years, according to a new survey that examines 2015 trends in healthcare recruitment. Despite the factors behind the shortage–including the millions of newly insured consumers under the Affordable …

Written by Shannon Barnet www.beckershospitalreview.com While job areas related to patient care have experienced a long history of diversification, the same cannot be said of healthcare jobs in upper management, according to a report from the NAACP. Some hospitals and health systems have created programs to monitor diversity procurement but, overall, diversity …

By LIZ NEPORENT http://abcnews.go.com Call it socialized medicine for the digital age. Figure 1, a new smart phone app lets doctors and other medical professionals from all over the world swap pictures and info about their cases. The app as has been described as “Instagram for doctors,” a phrase its founder and …

Written by Catharine Paddock PhD www.medicalnewstoday.com Doctors and researchers writing in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine argue it is time to push the message that UV tanning causes – as opposed to merely being associated with – skin cancer. They note that when the US Surgeon General finally announced that smoking causes lung …

Bruce Davis, MD www.physiciansweekly.com I’m on day 5 of an 8-day run of Port-and-Starboard trauma call (Navy talk for every other night) and am feeling my age. There was a time when I could do this for weeks at a time and still have the energy to play or go …

ROB STEIN www.npr.org When Kevin Lopez opens the door to his Greenbelt, Md., apartment to greet a visitor he’s never before met, he initially conceals his right hand. “I’m self-conscious, definitely, about my right hand,” he says. But eventually Lopez relaxes. “I was born like this,” he says. “As you …

By STEVE LOHR www.nytimes.com Steven Keating’s doctors and medical experts view him as a citizen of the future. A scan of his brain eight years ago revealed a slight abnormality — nothing to worry about, he was told, but worth monitoring. And monitor he did, reading and studying about brain …

By Peter Shadbolt www.cnn.com Ever had a headache so big, you felt like drilling a hole in your head to let the pain out? In Neolithic times trepanation — or drilling a hole into the skull — was thought to be a cure for everything from epilepsy to migraines. It …

ANNA GORMAN www.npr.org Dan Swangard knows what death looks like. As a physician, he has seen patients die in hospitals, hooked to morphine drips and overcome with anxiety. He has watched death drag on for weeks or months as terrified relatives stand by helplessly. Recently, however, his thoughts about how …

By MIKKAEL A. SEKERES, M.D. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com   Every night when I put my 6-year-old son to sleep, we go through the same routine. At his request, I carry him upstairs, slung over my shoulder like a “sack of potatoes.” Then, I sit on his bed while he changes into his pajamas; …

By Nick Thompson and Laura Smith-Spark www.cnn.com It might sound like a really old wives’ tale, but a thousand-year-old Anglo-Saxon potion for eye infections may hold the key to wiping out the modern-day superbug MRSA, according to new research. The 10th-century “eyesalve” remedy was discovered at the British Library in a leather-bound volume of Bald’s Leechbook, widely …

Markus MacGill www.medicalnewstoday.com After receiving an experimental emergency vaccine, a doctor from the US who had received a needle stick injury, and so put at high risk of infection while working in an Ebola treatment unit in Sierra Leone, has been found clear of the virus. The physician, given the …

Anne Austin www.theweek.com We might think of state supported health care as an innovation of the 20th century, but it’s a much older tradition than that. In fact, texts from a village dating back to Egypt’s New Kingdom period, about 3,100-3,600 years ago, suggest that in ancient Egypt there was a …

www.sciencedaily.com Both physicians and patients overestimate the risk of heart attack or death for possible acute coronary syndrome (ACS) as well as the potential benefit of hospital admission for possible ACS. A survey of patient and physician communication and risk assessment, along with an editorial, were published online last week …

www.physiciansweekly.com On Gary Schwitzer’s website healthnewsreview.org, a debate about the role of physicians who work as journalists took place. It was sparked by an NBC News report on the changing of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome to its new name—Systemic Exertion Intolerance Disease (SEID). The report featured commentary by Dr. Natalie Azar, …

LAURA STARECHESKI www.npr.org The University of Florida’s Dr. Nancy Hardt has an unusual double specialty: She’s both a pathologist and an OB-GYN. For the first half of her career, she brought babies into the world. Then she switched — to doing autopsies on people after they die. It makes perfect …

www.fda.gov The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the ResQCPR System, a system of two devices for first responders to use while performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on people whose hearts stop beating (cardiac arrest). The devices may improve the patient’s chances of surviving cardiac arrest. The Centers for Disease Control …

Bruce Davis, MD www.physiciansweekly.com I was not having a good morning. I had just come off Trauma call—a difficult 24hr shift that was finally behind me. I had finished a long week of rounding on the Trauma Service and had turned the patients over to Sid, who would be the …

TARA PARKER-POPE http://well.blogs.nytimes.com Hair loss is one of the most obvious side effects of cancer treatment. Now, a growing number of breast cancer patients are freezing their scalps as a way to preserve their hair during chemotherapy. The hair-saving treatment, widely used in Europe, requires a specialized frozen cap worn …

David McNamee www.medicalnewstoday.com An analysis of data provided by 135,000 randomly selected participants – including 19,000 people who had used drugs such as LSD and magic mushrooms – finds that use of psychedelics does not increase risk of developing mental health problems. The results are published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. …

Diana Phillips www.medscape.com Nearly all of the infants with confirmed cases of neonatal abstinence syndrome identified in three Florida hospitals during a 2-year period had documented in utero opioid exposure. Yet only 10% of their mothers received or were referred for drug addiction rehabilitation or counseling at the time of …

www.ama-assn.org The medical education overhaul continues—and not just with undergraduate med ed. Changes being launched now in medical schools are touching graduate medical education and pre-medical education, seeking to better prepare doctors for a health care system that is constantly changing. Academic physicians covered these innovations in an online video panel Tuesday …

NSIKAN AKPAN www.npr.org How do you turn a contagious disease like tuberculosis from a set of statistics — 9 million cases, 1.5 million deaths a year — into a human story? One way is by making a 4 1/2 minute video. “Thembi Jakiwe: Strength of a Woman” is the story of a …

STEVE LOHR www.nytimes.com Jeffrey Hammerbacher is a number cruncher — a Harvard math major who went from a job as a Wall Street quant to a key role at Facebook to a founder of a successful data start-up. But five years ago, he was given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, …

GILLIAN MOHNEY http://abcnews.go.com A family that had to go to court to get a brain-dead woman taken off life support is now fighting to change Texas law so other families won’t have to go through the same ordeal. The family of Marlise Munoz is working with Texas lawmakers to craft a new …

Honor Whiteman www.medicalnewstoday.com Although around 25-40% of children and adolescents in the US experience some form of sleep disorder, such conditions are often overlooked, with a lack of realization of just how important a good night’s sleep is for a child’s present and later-life health. In line with National Sleep …

www.physiciansweekly.com A study presented at the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) meeting in October of last year found that patients who chew gum in the immediate preoperative period may safely undergo surgery. The authors, based at the University of Pennsylvania, found that gum chewing increases saliva production and the volume of …

Honor Whiteman www.medicalnewstoday.com When receiving information about treatment options and prognosis, advanced cancer patients favor doctors who provide more optimistic information and perceive them to be more compassionate when delivering it. This is according to a new study published in JAMA Oncology. The study was conducted by researchers from the University …

Catharine Paddock PhD www.medicalnewstoday.com Brains of older people with Alzheimer’s disease show characteristic abnormal clusters of faulty protein called amyloid. Now, for the first time, scientists have discovered amyloid can begin to accumulate in the brains of people as young as 20. The finding is surprising because it was thought …

KATHERINE HOBSON www.npr.org A group of lung cancer survivors was chatting online last May about what they thought was a big problem: Influential treatment guidelines published by a consortium of prominent cancer centers didn’t reflect an option that several people thought had saved their lives. They wanted to change that. …

LAURA STARECHESKI www.npr.org In the 1980s, Dr. Vincent Felitti, now director of the California Institute of Preventive Medicine in San Diego, discovered something potentially revolutionary about the ripple effects of child sexual abuse. He discovered it while trying to solve a very different health problem: helping severely obese people lose weight. Felitti, …

Jonathan Harris whatstrending.com Jimmy Kimmel made a good point. If you don’t believe what a doctor tells you about vaccines, why would you believe him about anything else? If he’s likely to intentionally poison your children so that he can line the pockets of GlaxoSmithKline, why would you go there …

Honor Whiteman www.medicalnewstoday.com A new case report published in the journal Open Forum Infectious Diseases reveals that a woman who was treated for a recurrent Clostridium difficile infection with the gut bacteria of an overweight donor quickly and unexpectedly gained weight herself following the procedure. The authors say the case suggests doctors should avoid …

CATHERINE SAINT LOUIS www.nytimes.com A wide majority of pediatricians and family physicians acquiesce to parents who wish to delay vaccinating their children, even though the doctors feel these decisions put children at risk for measles, whooping cough and other ailments, a new survey has found. Physicians who reluctantly agreed said they did so …