August 30th, 2011 by Happy Hospitalist in Opinion
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The total debt cost of medical school has become obnoxious. When I started medical school 15 years ago this month, I took out approximately $2,000 a month in loans. $1,000 a month for all living expenses, including food, rent, utilities and entertainment and $1,000 a month for tuition and related expenses. I got out of medical school with just under $110,000 in loans for which I am currently paying back at a rate of $500 month for 30 years.
I learned the other day that a family medicine resident recently completed medical school with almost $250,000 in medical school loans. Family medicine? $250,000? Are you crazy? If that resident can lock in a 30 year loan at 3.5%, they’re looking at monthly payments of $1,200 a month for the rest of their lives. With current tax rates, this family resident will need to earn at least Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Happy Hospitalist*
August 30th, 2011 by Iltifat Husain, M.D. in News
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I was always under the impression that medical documentation was reserved for the office and the hospital. Not necessarily so — even in the battlefield, medics document medical care in real time.
Unfortunately, the tools they use to do this documentation consists of bulky Motorola hand held devices that are four years old.
Four years is an eternity in the tech world. To put this in perspective, I was still rocking a Motorola RAZR back then. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Army is field testing the iPhone, iPad, and Android smartphones in the battlefield. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*
August 29th, 2011 by Elaine Schattner, M.D. in News
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Recently, the FDA announced its approval, upon accelerated review, of a new drug, Adcetris (brentuximab) for patients with Hodgkin’s lymphoma that has relapsed after bone marrow transplant and for some patients with T-cell anaplastic large cell lymphoma (ALCL).
This interests me for a lot of reasons, among them that I used to work in the field of lymphoma immunology and spent some time in my life studying molecules like CD30, the protein to which the new antibody binds.
First, a mini-primer on the disease and numbers of patients involved: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medical Lessons*
August 29th, 2011 by Harriet Hall, M.D. in Opinion, Research
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During the early days of the 2009 H1N1 influenza A pandemic, the popular herbal formula maxingshigan–yinqiaosan was used widely by TCM practitioners to reduce symptoms. (It’s hard to pronounce and spell, so I’ll refer to it as M-Y.) A new study was done to test whether M-Y worked and to compare it to the prescription drug oseltamivir. It showed that M-Y did not work for the purpose it was being used for: it did not reduce symptoms, although it did reduce the duration of one sign, fever, allowing researchers to claim they had proved that it works as well as oseltamivir.
“Oseltamivir Compared With the Chinese Traditional Therapy: Maxingshigan–Yinqiaosan in the Treatment of H1N1 Influenza” by Wang et al. was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine earlier this month. The study was done in China, which is notorious for only publishing positive studies. Even if it were an impeccable study, we would have to wonder if other studies with unfavorable results had been “file-drawered.” It’s not impeccable; it’s seriously peccable.
It was randomized, prospective, and controlled; but not placebo controlled, because they couldn’t figure out how to prepare an adequate placebo control. They considered that including Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
August 29th, 2011 by Berci in News
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I’ve always been a great fan of what Mayo Clinic has been doing on social media. Then after Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media was launched, I became a member of the international external advisory board which I’m very proud of. I reported when they launched a patient community and also discussed how well they did this. Now the Center is 1 year old and still performs perfectly. An excerpt form their previous entry:
Here’s a sneak peek of a few topics that were discussed during Mayo’s retreat: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*
