July 5th, 2011 by admin in Health Policy, Health Tips
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If you are a smoker, or love someone who smokes, the specter of lung cancer is ever looming. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to detect lung cancer in its earliest and most curable stages, much like the goal of mammograms for breast cancer?
Although it seems like common sense to do such advance checks—a process called lung cancer screening—studies to date haven’t shown that finding lung cancer early translates into fewer deaths from the disease.
A new report in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that screening heavy smokers with yearly low-dose CT scans can reduce deaths from lung cancer by 20% compared to screening with chest x-rays. The results are from the National Lung Screening Trial, which included more than 53,000 current and former heavy smokers between the ages of 55 and 74. (Preliminary results from this trial were covered in the Harvard Health Letter and in the Harvard Health blog.) Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Harvard Health Blog*
July 5th, 2011 by RyanDuBosar in News, Research
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Prescription opiates rose to one-third of all treatment admissions in 2009, from 8% in 1999, reflecting the rising trends in prescription opiate abuse. There were nearly 2 million substance abuse treatment admissions in 2009 among people ages 12 and older were reported to the Treatment Episode Data Set, a reporting system involving treatment facilities from across the country.
Five substance groups accounted for 96% of admissions: alcohol (42%), opiates (21%), marijuana (18%), cocaine (9%), and methamphetamine/amphetamines (6%), reported the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The data came from 49 states and Puerto Rico. Georgia and the District of Columbia did not report admissions for 2009. One person can be reported as multiple admissions in a year.
Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
July 4th, 2011 by KerriSparling in True Stories
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Back at the beginning of May, the Bird took a swipe at my left eyeball with her little birdie talon, ripping off a nice, solid chunk of my cornea and leaving me in some serious pain. It was a rough couple of days, especially because Chris was away for the week on business, but my family and friends pitched in to help with the baby and to allow me to heal.
I figured I was done with this issue.
“You may want to be careful about recurrence, Kerri. With this kind of injury, it does happen.” My eye doctor warned me, handing me a small tube of eye goop stuff. “This is Muro 128. Pull down your lower eyelid and smear this in there. It will help keep your eye coated while you sleep.”
(Oh eyeball injuries. You make me feel old, because if you Google “Muro 128,” you’ll see that this product is targeted at the 60+ crowd. Throw in a few tennis balls for my walker and I’m ready for my debut at the bingo hall.)
I used the stuff, but it wasn’t enough Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Six Until Me.*
July 4th, 2011 by DrRich in Health Policy, Opinion
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Everyone agrees that national spending on healthcare is on a trajectory to bankrupt America during the lifetimes of even Old Farts like DrRich. And therefore, most folks* agree that we ought to do something to reduce our national spending on healthcare.
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*The reason it’s only “most folks” who agree is that, apparently, some folks are still partial to the Cloward-Piven strategy, and continuing to spend on healthcare as we are doing today is the quickest and surest way to get there.
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Unfortunately, our national “discussion” on how to achieve this reduction in healthcare spending has devolved into a spectacle of accusations and counter-accusations, vituperation, abuse, and scurrility. Accordingly, not much useful has so far been achieved. Worse, the back-and-forth contumelies lobbed by the various interest groups in this national discussion have created a general sense among the public that the problem is so confused and chaotic, so rifled by conflicts of interest, and so very complex, as to be fundamentally unsolvable.
This general sense of despair is entirely unnecessary. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Covert Rationing Blog*
July 4th, 2011 by ChristopherChangMD in Health Tips
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One June 20, 2011, NPR aired a great story about how a person may not “see” a person getting beat up on the side of a jogging path when they are focused on a task (pursuing another jogger)… even if they pass RIGHT BY THE FIGHT!!!
In fact, only a third of the subjects reported seeing this mock fight when the experiment was conducted at night. Even more surprisingly, broad daylight didn’t improve the statistics (only 40% noticed the fight).
Though the situation and circumstances do not exactly correspond, there is a lesson to be learned here that applies to a medical visit.
As an ENT, I often see patients for a very specific complaint…
“My right ear hurts.”
“I have a bad cough.”
No matter what the complaint, unless it is for a specific task (there is earwax… can you remove it), I most always still do a complete ear, nose, and throat exam no matter the complaint.
Why??? Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Fauquier ENT Blog*
