So I’m watching the evening network TV news the other night – I know, silly me – and I see this commercial pop up that visualizes artificial knee joint replacement surgery like peeling an apple. Now part of the ad pitch is that this is for “partial knee replacement.” You know what? Partial or not, [...]
In a week in which we already wrote about US drug stores giving out free statin drugs, we thought readers might be interested in how a new (new-ish) skin cholesterol test is being marketed, and how some Canadian drug stores are getting in on the act. Someone in Canada sent me the following news release: [...]
This is an updated version (on March 17) of the post that first appeared on March 11 – with new information. While the big American College of Cardiology conference was going on more than a week ago, you may have missed how a tangled mess in the way health care news is disseminated was on [...]
We’ve been following claims for Cyberknife “knife-less surgery” for a long time. See search results from our blog. We’ve seen billboards promoting it in the metropolitan health care market we live in. And big East Coast medical centers promoting it at subway stops. But only recently did we start noticing many TV commercials promoting [...]
I’m a big fan of Minnesota Public Radio and usually a big fan of their health care news coverage. They’ve done some bold and innovative coverage in recent years. But when I heard (on the radio) and saw (online) MPR’s story, “Prostate cancer scan advance helps Mayo doctors with early detection,” I saw some red [...]
If there is an editorial bias in a newspaper one can look for it in many ways. For example: what a paper chooses to write about, how it does so, and what a paper chooses not to write about. Just 3 weeks ago I wrote, “Reporting on Medtronic mess – recipe for home cooking in [...]
Last week, the American Society for Radiation Oncology’s annual conference was held in Boston, and several papers were presented on proton beam therapy, and several medical centers sent out news releases about their involvement in the work. MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and Loma Linda University Medical Center in California were two that we [...]
One of the most thorough examinations of the Senate Finance Committee report on Medtronic’s research and marketing of its spinal surgery product, Infuse, was delivered by Roy Poses on his Health Care Renewal blog: “Marketers’ Systemic Influence over Ostensibly Scholarly, Peer-Reviewed Publications: the Medtronic Infuse BMP-2 Example.” His powerful concluding suggestion: “Going forward, we must [...]
The journal Arthritis Care & Research has accepted for future publication – and posted online (for subscribers) – an unedited paper, “Preceding the Procedure: Medical Devices and Shared Decision-Making.” The paper builds on a hypothetical example of a man in his 50s with hip arthritis who is facing a decision about total hip replacement. Excerpts: [...]
Minnesota is the home of several medical device makers. So there’s been a lot of editorializing about the medical device tax in the Affordable Care Act. There has been some criticism of Minnesota politicians over whose interests they represent on the issue. Today’s Star Tribune carries a commentary from an industry spokesman – Dale Wahlstrom, [...]
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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