December 30th, 2010 by admin in Better Health Network, News, Research, True Stories
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Gene Goldwasser died last week. He was 88, and he was my friend.
I wrote previously about a series of conversations I conducted with Gene and Rabbi A.J. Wolf a few years ago. I met Gene one spring day after calling to invite him to sit in on a class I was teaching to a small group of medical students about social issues in healthcare.
I’d read about him in a book called “The $800 Million Pill,” by Merrill Goozner. In the book, Goozner writes the story of Gene’s two-decade hunt to isolate the hormone erythropoietin (EPO).
Part of the story relates how Gene tried to interest traditional big pharma companies in his discovery, only to be brushed aside. Instead, Gene wound up sharing his discovery with what became Amgen. The company went on to make a windfall from recombinant production of the hormone and licensing it as a drug for patients with anemia and kidney failure. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
December 26th, 2010 by JenniferKearneyStrouse in Better Health Network, News, Research
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Placebos helped ease symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) even when patients knew that was what they were taking, a new study reports.
Researchers randomly assigned 80 patients with IBS to receive placebo pills (openly labeled as such) or no treatment over a three-week period. Patients taking placebos had significantly higher mean scores on the IBS Global Improvement Scale at 11 and 21 days, and also reported significant improvements in symptom severity and relief. The results of the study, which was funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, were published online Dec. 22 by PLoS ONE.
Anthony Lembo, M.D., a study coauthor, said in a press release that he didn’t expect the placebo to work. “I felt awkward asking patients to literally take a placebo. But to my surprise, it seemed to work for many of them,” he said.
Ted Kaptchuk, O.M.D., the study’s lead author, told the LA Times that a larger study needs to be done to confirm the findings, and said that he didn’t believe such effects would be possible “without a positive doctor-patient relationship.”
ACP Internist looked at placebos’ place in clinical practice in a 2009 article. (PLoS ONE, Public Library of Science, LA Times, ACP Internist)
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
December 20th, 2010 by RyanDuBosar in Better Health Network, News, Research
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Emergency patients with acute abdominal pain feel more confident about medical diagnoses when a doctor has ordered a computed tomography (CT) scan, and nearly three-quarters of patients underestimate the radiation risk posed by this test, reports the Annals of Emergency Medicine.
“Patients with abdominal pain are four times more confident in an exam that includes imaging than in an exam that has no testing,” said the paper’s lead author. “Most of the patients in our study had little understanding of the amount of radiation delivered by one CT scan, never mind several over the course of a lifetime. Many of the patients did not recall earlier CT scans, even though they were listed in electronic medical records.”
Researchers surveyed 1,168 patients with non-traumatic abdominal pain. Confidence in medical evaluations with increasing levels of laboratory testing and imaging was rated on a 100-point scale. Then, to assess cancer risk knowledge, participants rated their agreement with these factual statements: “Approximately two to three abdominal CTs give the same radiation exposure as experienced by Hiroshima survivors,” and “Two to three abdominal CTs over a person’s lifetime can increase cancer risk.” Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
December 17th, 2010 by RyanDuBosar in Better Health Network, Research
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Six of the nation’s leading healthcare systems will collaborate on outcomes, quality, and costs across eight common conditions or procedures in an effort to share best practices and reduce costs with the entire healthcare system.
Cleveland Clinic, Dartmouth-Hitchcock, Denver Health, Geisinger Health System, Intermountain Healthcare, and Mayo Clinic will to share data among their 10 million patients with The Dartmouth Institute, which will analyze the data and report back to the collaborative and the rest of the country, according to a press release.
The collaborative will focus on eight conditions and treatments for which costs have been increasing rapidly and for which there are wide variations in quality and outcomes across the country. The first three conditions to be studies are knee replacement, diabetes, and heart failure. They will be followed by asthma, weight loss surgery, labor and delivery, spine surgery, and depression.
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
December 14th, 2010 by RyanDuBosar in Better Health Network
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A federal judge in Virginia has ruled that healthcare reform is unconstitutional and expects the Obama administration to honor that ruling while it’s being appealed. But states and private companies are continuing to plan and budget for it nonetheless.
The court ruled that Congress exceeded its constitutional powers in compelling Americans to buy health insurance. Judges elsewhere have ruled the law is valid or dismissed the cases on procedural grounds, while a judge in Florida will hear another case later this week.
In the meantime, though, employers and healthcare companies have to continue adjusting to the reform law’s many provisions. States will continue to set up their health insurance exchanges, and they’ve already budgeted for the additional 16 million people who will qualify for Medicaid under the law. And the Obama administration is unlikely to stop what it’s doing, since many of the provisions won’t take effect until 2014.
A key of the lawsuit is “economic inactivity.” The ruling says that while Congress can regulate interstate commerce, it can’t regulate…well, non-commerce, in this case the decision not to buy health insurance. The judge’s decision is online. (Politico, Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, MSNBC)
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
