January 2nd, 2012 by Michael Kirsch, M.D. in News, Opinion
No Comments »
A hundred bucks doesn’t buy much these days. A crisp Ben Franklin can be exchanged for
- 50 Big Macs
- A Broadway show ticket
- A night in a New York City hotel (just joking)
- A college textbook (paperback)
- Your life
Your life? Yes, 5 crumpled Andy Jacksons can save your life, as was reported earlier this year in a front page article in The Plain Dealer, Cleveland’s only daily newspaper. University Hospital is now offering a $99 spiral computed tomography (CT scans) of the chest in individuals who are at increased risk of developing lung cancer. The rationale is that if cancers can be detected early, then the cure rate for surgical removal is very high.
Gary Schwitzer, medical blogger and press watchdog, tries to bring some balance to the distorted media coverage of CT lung cancer reportage.
The test is Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at MD Whistleblower*
November 15th, 2011 by RyanDuBosar in Research
No Comments »
Researchers found that while the vast majority of smokers want to stop, the vast majority who wanted to got little support from their health care providers. Not that they’d approached their provider, either.
68.8% of current cigarette smokers said they would like to completely stop smoking, and 52.4% had tried to quit smoking in the past year. However, 68.3% of the smokers who tried to quit did so without using evidence-based cessation counseling or medications, and only 48.3% of those who had visited a health-care provider in the past year reported receiving advice to quit smoking.
Little overall change has been observed in these measures in the past decade. However, Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
October 2nd, 2011 by HarvardHealth in Research
2 Comments »
Kicking the cigarette habit is one of the best things that smokers can do for themselves. Nicotine replacement products, prescription medications, and counseling can all help. What about the newest tobacco substitute, the electronic cigarette? Despite the appeal of so-called e-cigarettes, we don’t know enough about their safety or effectiveness to give them the green light.
Electronic cigarettes come in a variety of shapes. Some look like cigarettes, pipes, or cigars, while others are disguised as pens or other more socially acceptable items. Whatever their shape, they all are built around a battery-operated heating element, a replaceable cartridge that contains nicotine and other chemicals, and an atomizer that converts the chemicals into an inhalable vapor.
A study published this spring in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine concluded that electronic cigarettes may help smokers quit. Whether they are a safe way to quit is another question—preliminary studies from the FDA, New Zealand, and Greece raise some concerns.
There are three reasons to worry about electronic cigarettes. First, Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Harvard Health Blog*
July 14th, 2011 by GarySchwitzer in Opinion
No Comments »
This is not a lesson about the limitations of 140-character messages on Twitter.
Rather, it is a warning about careless Tweets that mischaracterize the real meat of the message in longer stories linked to in the Twitter message. As I wrote on Twitter in response to these two episodes, “Better not to Tweet on complex health care topics than to mischaracterize your own story with a misleading 140 characters.”
First, my friend Andrew Holtz caught the fact earlier this week that Men’s Health Magazine tweeted:
If you’re a smoker, you NEED to get a CT scan. Here’s why: http://ow.ly/5x34y
That “here’s why” link took you to a Men’s Health Magazine story, that despite being headlined “The Medical Test Every Smoker Needs,” went on to explain:
Don’t run out and ask for a CT scan, though. More than 96 percent of the positive screens in the study were false positives, which could subject you to unnecessary surgery, cancer treatments, and the complications that come with them. They’re also expensive: A chest CT scan can cost up to several thousands of dollars.
So look at how silly Men’s Health looked on this confusing back-and-forth message:
1. You NEED to get a CT scan.
2. It’s a test “every smoker needs”
3. But don’t run out and ask for one.
Then this morning I caught AARP doing the same thing. They tweeted:
Are you a smoker? CT scan those lungs – they’re proven to cut risk of lung cancer death for 55-plus: http://aarp.us/rdleHu
That links takes you to a story that includes caveats such as the following: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Gary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog*
July 5th, 2011 by admin in Health Policy, Health Tips
No Comments »
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*
A hundred bucks doesn’t buy much these days. A crisp Ben Franklin can be exchanged for
