Charming, if true. I’m so glad we have Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln working tirelessly on the Hill to protect and preserve the insurance companies and their profits.
Christina Turner feared that she might have been sexually assaulted after two men slipped her a knockout drug. She thought she was taking proper precautions when her doctor prescribed a month’s worth of anti-AIDS medicine.
Only later did she learn that she had made herself all but uninsurable.
Turner had let the men buy her drinks at a bar in Fort Lauderdale. The next thing she knew, she said, she was lying on a roadside with cuts and bruises that indicated she had been raped. She never developed an HIV infection. But months later, when she lost her health insurance and sought new coverage, she ran into a problem. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Movin' Meat*
The BBC is reporting on a wirelessly controlled “spider pill” being developed somewhere in Italy. The device supposedly has eight legs and reportedly can crawl through intestines. With an attached video camera, the device might actually become a diagnostic modality for imaging the intestinal tract. The big question is whether it is more unpleasant to have a colonoscope defile you or a robotic gerbil crawl through the insides.
Now that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has the power to regulate tobacco products we will see more meaningful moves to reduce the harmfulness and addictiveness of tobacco, as well as to reduce its addictiveness to young people. However, we should also expect the tobacco industry to respond by trying to find loopholes that help it get around these regulatory moves.
The first example is the ban on added flavors to cigarettes (which currently excludes menthol flavor, i.e. it is not banned automatically). Recently I’ve noticed an increased promotion of flavored cigars, often being sold as singles, in bright colorful packaging. The current FDA flavor regulation doesn’t ban fruit, candy and other flavors in cigars or smokeless tobacco, just cigarettes. Read more »
Almost a decade ago, I had a simple idea — deliver fast, accurate medical news to clinicians in a format that was easily accessible, and turn that news into a “teachable moment.” Almost five years ago, that idea became reality with the launch of MedPage Today.
Monday through Friday (and if news is happening, Saturday and Sunday, too), MedPage Today delivers on our promise of “Putting Breaking Medical News into Practice.”
Our reporters and editors not only scan prepublication copies of top medical journals seeking medical news that is likely to influence daily clinical practice, but also travel worldwide to report medical news delivered at scientific meetings.
These gatherings are important as a primary source of medical information. New medical information, or as we call it: News. Read more »
A recent survey commissioned by Hazeldon, a substance abuse treatment center, has inspired a campaign to start family conversations about alcohol. They call the campaign “Four Generations Overcoming Addiction,” and it encourages parents to talk with their children about their own alcohol use when they were teenagers.
The survey results from Ipsos Public Affairs are based on interviews done online with 603 teens between the ages of 15 and 18 and telephone interviews with 620 parents of teens. Some of the interesting results included: Read more »
It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…
I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…
I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…
When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…
I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…
