Kudos to Julie Appleby, Kaiser Health News, and the Washington Post for publishing the story, “Hospitals promote screenings that experts say many people do not need.” It’s a story that is reported infrequently, even though it could be reported any time in almost any city in the US – the practice is that widespread. The [...]
Dr. Rob Lamberts writes on his Musings of a Distractible Mind blog: Asking for “more” has caused trouble over the ages. Adam and Eve wanted more food choices, the people of Pompeii wanted more mountain-side housing, Napoleon and Adolph Hitler wanted to spend more time in Russia, and America wanted more of the Kardashians. We [...]
There has been much reaction to a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, “Effect of Three Decades of Screening Mammography on Breast-Cancer Incidence.” It is at times like this that a lone blogger like me on a holiday weekend can easily feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the task of trying to capture [...]
That’s the conclusion of a paper published in the BMJ, “General health checks in adults for reducing morbidity and mortality from disease: Cochrane systematic review and meta-analysis.” The authors reported: We identified 16 trials, 14 of which had available outcome data (182 880 participants). Nine trials provided data on total mortality (11 940 deaths), and they gave [...]
I know I’m late on both of these, as both were published a week ago. Late or not, I like to catch up so that I can archive good stuff on my site. An analysis by the Nordic Cochrane Center in Copenhagen led to this conclusion: “General health checks did not reduce morbidity or mortality, [...]
Call it a retraction. Call it a correction. Call it important to correct the record. Back in January, I led the charge in criticizing ABC’s Bill Weir for his report on Dr. David Agus’ book, “The End of Illness,” and Weir’s claim that a CT scan Agus recommended may have saved Weir’s life. You can [...]
The PBS NewsHour reports on the most recent report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on global health care spending. Snapshots: NewsHour: The U.S. system is known for over-testing and over-treating, everything from CT scans and MRIs, knee replacements to coronary bypasses. How severe is the over-testing and why is it occurring? [...]
Ray Moynihan, a terrific health care journalist who is now pursuing his PhD on overdiagnosis and working as a Senior Research Fellow at Bond University in Australia, kicks off the first of a nine-part series, “Over-diagnosis Epidemic” on TheConversation.edu.au website. The first part is an introduction, “Preventing over-diagnosis: how to stop harming the healthy.” Other [...]
“Preventing overdiagnosis: how to stop harming the healthy,” is a feature in this week’s BMJ by Ray Moynihan, Jenny Doust and David Henry. I won’t try to recapture the entire piece in this blog because you should read it yourself. But here are section headings: Screening detected overdiagnosis Increasingly sensitive tests Incidentalomas Excessively widened definitions [...]
The Naked Doctor, aka Justin Coleman, has a mega-wrap of recent news on excessive testing and treatment on the Croakey blog. And on the Columbia Journalism Review blog, “The Observatory,” Curtis Brainard offers a wrap view of “Nutrition Coverage Under Fire: From red meat to white rice, not enough skepticism of observational studies.“ His [...]
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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