Journalist Laura Newman, on her Patient POV blog, posts, “MR Imaging, Electronic Test Ordering Creates Waste.” She writes: Waste is what you get with rampant, uncritical use of MRI and health information technology, according to two papers out this week. The authors of a companion editorial to one of the papers even go so far [...]
The National Journal reports on a new analysis from the International Federation of Health Plans (pdf file). Excerpts: The group’s survey of expenses for medical procedures, tests, scans and treatments in nine countries shows that Americans pay more for physician time, for scans, surgery and drugs than people in Spain, France, Germany, Argentina, Chile, Canada, [...]
The following is an unsolicited guest post submitted by Donald W. Light, University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey, and Rebecca Warburton, University of Victoria, Canada. It is followed by some comments in response from Matthew Herper, the writer of the Forbes article in question. We are pleased to provide this forum for this [...]
Nothing new, just good perspective in a Reuters piece, “Stemming the tide of overtreatment in U.S. healthcare.” And some great quotes. Examples: “I don’t trust professional societies to (set clinical guidelines) because that’s how they make money – by doing tests and procedures,” said MIT healthcare economist Dr. Jonathan Gruber; “When hospitals buy robots they [...]
I’ve recently become aware of – and hope to collaborate and share ideas with – a Canadian website called EvidenceNetwork.ca. The founders describe this as “a non-partisan web-based project funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Manitoba Health Research Council to make the latest evidence on controversial health policy issues available to the media. [...]
The blogger known only as the Skeptical Scalpel (self-described as a surgeon for 40 years and a surgical department chairman and residency program director for over 23 of those years) continues his thread of posts raising questions about the proliferation of robotic surgery. The latest is entitled “Study: Robotic surgery financials explained.” It’s his take [...]
We should not overlook the Journal of Clinical Oncology editorial (opens as pdf file) that accompanied the robotic prostatectomy side effects paper about which we’ve already blogged. That editorial – by 3 authors from the University of California San Francisco cancer center – reminds readers that the costs of robotic prostatectomy (on average, they say, [...]
I have written many times on this blog about one shining example of the medical arms race – the slow (some would say not so slow), steady, proliferation of huge and hugely expensive proton beam radiation facilities in medical centers in the US. I have written about how the proliferation never seems to occur in [...]
Two items in the news reflect the dilemma that health care consumers face on health care cost issues. The Washington Post published advice from Dr. John Santa of Consumer Reports for people with health insurance but who “are facing large deductibles and also paying an increasingly large portion of the rest of the bill.” But [...]
The following is a guest blog post by Marilyn Mann, a securities lawyer who became interested in medical research while researching treatment options for her teenage daughter, who has heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia, a genetic disease that causes very high LDL-cholesterol. She blogs at http://marilynmann.wordpress.com/. ———————————————————————— “Oh no he didn’t.” That was my first reaction when, [...]
It’s difficult to do an overview of melanoma drug research in a relatively brief story. But this story did a solid job.
Better than a competing piece by Reuters but still a little short on some details about this asthma drug study.
An adequate summary of this asthma drug trial’s design doesn’t make up for the overly optimistic tone about the drug’s future. A New York Times story was better.
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