August 19th, 2010 by DavedeBronkart in Better Health Network, Expert Interviews, Health Policy, Opinion
Tags: Doc Tom, e-Patients.net, Healing Healthcare, Illness Care, Level Of Wellness, Medical Self-Care, Mother Earth News, Paticipatory Medicine, Tom Ferguson
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Next in our series of posts about our founder Doc Tom. Previous time capsules: 1980 and 1985.
Come, ye economics buffs and algebra fans: Get out your pencils and solve for x, n, and XX:
Whatever else the year 19XX is remembered for, it will — without a doubt — go down in history as a record year for medical expenses here in the United States. All indications are that before the calendar year is out, Americans will have spent $x (n% of the Gross National Product) on drugs, X-rays, surgery, physicians’ fees, laboratory tests, hospital overhead, health insurance, etc. That’s up from the [$0.3x] ([.7n%] of GNP) just 13 years ago.
Clearly, the medical establishment has become a threat to the average American’s budget (if not his health).
Ready? That was…1978. Check the tiny numbers:
Whatever else 1978 is remembered for, it will—without a doubt—go down in history as a record year for medical expenses here in the United States. All indications are that before the calendar year is out, 216 million Americans will have spent $139 billion (8.6% of the Gross National Product) on drugs, X-rays, surgery, physicians’ fees, laboratory tests, hospital overhead, health insurance, etc. That’s up from the $39 billion (5.9% of GNP) medical care cost in 1965 . . . just 13 years ago.
Tom Ferguson was a medical student, and in the self-reliant era of the Whole Earth Catalog, he saw that patients could help heal healthcare by taking better care of themselves. In 1976 he’d started a magazine called Medical Self-Care. The text above appeared in Mother Earth News in May 1978, as the introduction to an 8,000-word interview with Tom. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at e-Patients.net*
August 19th, 2010 by Debra Gordon in Better Health Network, Health Policy, News, Opinion, Research
Tags: Accelerated Approval, Avastin, Bevacizumab, Breast Cancer, Cancer Drug, Cancer Research, Cancer Survival Rates, Cancer Trials, Clinical Trials, Conditional Drug Approval, Drug Approval Revoked, Drug Risk Factors, FDA, Food and Drug Administration, Healthcare reform, Metastatic Cancer, Oncology, Progressive-Free Survival, Revoking A Drug, Targeted Monoclonal Antibody, Tumor Angiogenesis, Tumor Drug
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Time to get back up on my soap box.
Next month the FDA is supposed to consider taking the unique, first-time-ever step of revoking a drug’s indication not because it’s dangerous, but because it doesn’t work well enough to offset its risks. Never mind that it costs about $8,000 a month.
The drug is Avastin (bevacizumab), a targeted monoclonal antibody that prevents tumors from creating and maintaining their own blood supply, a process called angiogenesis. Without oxygen and nutrients from blood, tumors can’t keep growing.
Avastin is the world’s best-selling cancer drug, approved for use with chemotherapy to treat lung cancer and metastatic colorectal and breast cancer. It is also being investigated (and, likely, being prescribed off label) for numerous other cancers. The problem comes with breast cancer. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at A Medical Writer's Musings on Medicine, Health Care, and the Writing Life*
August 19th, 2010 by Lucy Hornstein, M.D. in Better Health Network, Opinion, Quackery Exposed, Research
Tags: Acupuncture, CAM, Complementary And Alternative Medicine, Conventional Medicine, Evidence Based Medicine, Harriet Hall, Holocaust Denial, Medical Quackery, New England Journal of Medicine, Science Based Medicine, Science Denialists, Selective Science Denialism, Steve Novella, TCM, Traditional Chinese Medicine
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Statement #1:
The holocaust never happened. Hitler loved Jews and respected Jewish culture. The photographic evidence of the camps, including the bodies and atrocities, were all fakes designed by the State of Israel to generate international sympathy.
Statement #2:
Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is an effective treatment for numerous medical conditions. Acupuncture has been around for centuries and is widely practiced in China and elsewhere. Science has proven its efficacy in controlled experiments.
With any luck, that first statement should generate dozens of hits from watchdog groups berating me for spreading the vile lie of Holocaust denial.
The second statement, or words perilously close to that effect, has appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, a previously-prestigious medical publication now revealed to be no better than the National Enquirer or any other sleazy tabloid, fit only for lining bird cages and wrapping week-old fish. Thanks to this wonderful article by Harriet Hall, it turns out that the first reference to “needling” in Chinese medical literature is from 90 B.C., although it doesn’t refer to acupuncture. It’s talking about lancing abscesses and bloodletting. The technology required to make sufficiently thin needles didn’t even exist until 400 years ago.The Chinese government tried to ban acupuncture several times around the turn of the twentieth century. The actual term “Traditional Chinese Medicine” was coined by Mao Tse Dung in the 1960s! (Go read Hall’s article linked above. It’s awesome.)
So riddle me this, campers: Why (and how) do science denialists get away with these outrageous lies? Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Musings of a Dinosaur*
August 19th, 2010 by Berci in Better Health Network, News, Research
Tags: Analyze Your DNA, Direct-To-Consumer Genetic Testing, DTC Genetics, Family Medical History, Genetic Information, Genetics, Heredity, Mary Carmichael, Newsweek, Science Reporting
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Mary Carmichael of Newsweek had a great series of articles focusing on direct-to-consumer genetic testing. An excerpt:
I’ve been following DTC genetics since 2007, when wide scanning first became available to the public. Since then, a number of writers have gotten wide-scale genetic tests and expounded on the results. Indeed, I sometimes wonder if I’m the last science reporter on earth with virgin genes. (Technical virgin: My doctor gave me a cystic fibrosis carrier test when I was pregnant.) Initially, I put off getting a full-genome scan because I wasn’t sure how useful such a test would be. I had no particular reason to take one, save curiosity. I wouldn’t expect to find anything serious and potentially life-altering like the Huntington’s disease gene in my results, because my family medical history is thankfully rather boring. The data most likely to be medically relevant to me would concern the genetics of common diseases, and at the time, many comprehensive and well-designed studies of those were still getting underway. I decided to wait a few years and see how research progressed. But here I am, three years later, still unsure.
*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*
August 19th, 2010 by Medgadget in Better Health Network, News, Research
Tags: BBC News, Dispense Medication Directly, England, Express Prescriptions, In-Store Pharmacy, Pharmacology, PharmaTrust, Prescription Drugs, Sainsbury's, UK Trial, Vending Machine, West Sussex
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The UK supermarket chain Sainsbury’s is running a trial with two different drug vending machines in two of its West Sussex stores. Basically you can drop your prescription at the machine, the pharmacy will collect the prescriptions and deliver the medications which you can later pick up.
As the machines are placed in stores with an in-store pharmacy service, the only benefit seems to be the lack of face-to-face contact (for those people who consider that a benefit). The trial will run for a year after which it will be decided whether they will be rolled out across all of England. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
Next in our series of posts about our founder Doc Tom. Previous time capsules: 1980 and 1985.
