Category: Medicine
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Conspiracy-targeted Campaigning from Romney
Slate has an interesting article about Romney campaign mailings that appear to contain buzzwords for chronic Lyme disease advocates in Virginia. Romney’s plan for Lyme disease includes these two points: IMPROVE SYNERGY Ensure that government agencies have an open line of communication and work with patients, researchers, doctors, and businesses in an objective, comprehensive manner.…
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2nd US Hospital to do full face transplant – today at University of Maryland
The news was just publicly announced that the University of Maryland is now the 2nd hospital to perform full face transplant in the US. Just a handful of these procedures have been performed around the world, and they are enormously complex ethically, surgically and medically. To begin with, long before the surgery even became a…
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CSPI overblows the cancer risk of caramel coloring in soda
The safety of soda has been in the news a lot lately. The news even seems bad for diet coke, which hits close to home for me given my diet coke addiction. The worst seems to be this correlative study proposing a link between diet sodas and stroke risk: The study, which followed more than…
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Accountability in Science Journalism: two recent examples of failures in the NYT and Forbes
Ed Yong demands higher accountability in science journalism and has made me think of how in the last two days I’ve run across two examples of shoddy reporting. These two articles I think encompass a large part of the problem, the first from the NYT, represents the common failure of science reporters to be critical…
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Forcing Doctors to Perform Unnecessary Medical Procedures is Unethical and Unlawful
Many bloggers and commentators have expressed outrage over the decision by Virginia to require ultrasound examination, possibly transvaginal ultrasound, prior to women obtaining an abortion. From Bill Maher to Dahlia Lithwick people are outraged and have even suggested that it should be considered rape to force women to undergo vaginal examination by ultrasound prior to…
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Drug Shortages Reveal the Free Market is Failing Our Sickest Patients
**Update, the NYT has an editorial in their Sunday edition recommending the passage of two bills in congress requiring advanced notice from drug manufacturers in event of likely shortage. Health affairs discusses the increasingly frequent shortages of critical, life-saving, generic drugs. This is a serious problem that seems mostly limited to the U.S. healthcare system,…
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Two great obesity articles from the NYT and what they mean for you
A few weeks ago Tara Parker Pope wrote The Fat Trap for the NYT and once I read it I started sending it to other doctors I know. It is a great summary on the current knowledge of why we get fat, and more importantly for those of us that already are tipping the scales,…
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Are Patients in Universal Healthcare Countries Less Satisfied?
A dishonest campaign has started against healthcare reform in this country and the first shot has come from Conservatives for Patients Rights (CPR), a group purporting to show that patients in universal health systems suffer from government interference in health care. To bolster their argument, they have a pile of anecdotes from people around the…
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Obesity – A new study and what it means to be a “healthy weight”
In response to the conversation on “Obesity, Evolution and Delayed Gratification” on the main page and Razib’s coverage of a fascinating new study on the relationship to the lactase gene and obesity, I thought now would be a good time to write about an important new study that helps define the boundaries of what normal…
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What should a national health care system look like?
I was pleased to see president Obama deliver this address yesterday: Click To Play I was even more pleased because he has gathered the traditional opponents of healthcare reform around him and has convinced them to commit to reform in the US system. This is a positive sign. However, I’m concerned because, as with all…