Laparoscopic cholecystectomy, as Paul Levy writes on his Not Running A Hospital blog, is a surgery to remove a gall bladder using laparoscopic instruments through holes in the abdomen instead of cutting it open. Lap choles, for short. “So, what do you do if you are a robotic surgery device company that has saturated the [...]
In December of 2011 I wrote about about New Jersey’s Saint Barnabas medical center promoting its robotic surgery system to holiday shoppers at a New Jersey shopping mall. Then, in December of 2012, I wrote about the mall marketing trend spreading to places around the country. Now, the New Jersey medical center gets more publicity by [...]
Probably the two most frequent subjects on this blog regarding the proliferation of new medical technologies are proton beam radiation therapy and robotic surgery. Since this blog focuses on media messages about health care interventions, we generally focus on the marketing claims made for these technologies. The latest edition of the journal Current Urology Reports [...]
Paul Levy, former hospital CEO, on his Not Running a Hospital blog, writes, “More robots, more questions.” The topic this time: robotic partial knee replacement surgery. In it, he links to the BioLogic Equity Research site, and its article, “Anatomy of a Deceptive Direct to Consumer Robotic Surgery Marketing Campaign.” Then, days later, Levy blogged, [...]
The Boston Globe reports that: Reports of complications from robot-assisted surgery are rising, according to Massachusetts health officials who sent hospitals an “advisory” letter last week alerting them about their safety concerns. In some cases, it appears that doctors have used the aggressively marketed robots to perform hysterectomies and colorectal operations that were too complex [...]
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists released a statement on robotic surgery this week that concluded: Aggressive direct-to-consumer marketing of the latest medical technologies may mislead the public into believing that they are the best choice. Our patients deserve and need factual information about all of their treatment options, including costs, so that they [...]
The surgeon who blogs and tweets as The Skeptical Scalpel (@Skepticscalpel) started my day with a Tweet that read: Houston Chronicle’s hard-hitting exposé on robotic surgery. http://is.gd/lT5ed4 You have to know his work and his style to know that he was being sarcastic about “hard hitting exposé.” The headline of the piece is: Advances in [...]
A piece in Barron’s, “Robots in Search of Added Employment,” offers a good update on the proliferation of daVinci robotic surgical systems. From the piece: No other big health-care company is putting up (earnings) numbers like (theirs). The robot was used last year in about 450,000 surgeries of various kinds around the world. The US [...]
Flu Follies: CNN’s Piers Morgan Falls Ill Days After Getting Flu Shot On The Air From Dr. Oz. Should Journalists Cite Material from Predatory Journals? – Scholarly Open Access blog. Eve Harris, who recently took a fulltime job as a patient navigator at UCSF, published her “coming out” piece, as she calls it - “Skin [...]
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 [...]
This story focuses on a family that may have a rare genetic mutation that increases their risk of heart disease. Unfortunately, the “rare” part wasn’t mentioned until 1,600 words into this 2,100 word story.
While this story adequately addressed 7 of our 10 criteria, the 3 on which it missed were significant omissions, yet could have been easily addressed.
Solid medical conference reporting, with many expert interviews and good context provided. Goes far beyond the conference presentation itself.
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