medicine
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Tag archives for medicine
You have to move fast these days to keep up with the flu. Or outrun it. A quick roundup from the last 24: From the invaluable H5N1: Mexico: 4,000 H1N1 cases in 7 days Spain: 31,322 cases and 6 deaths in one week US: 15 states could run out of hospital beds Scotland sees it…
“One in six patients ‘wrongly diagnosed by NHS doctors’,” shouts the Daily Mail (via EvidenceMatters. This should not surprise us: Autopsies have been finding a similar percentage of misdiagnosis among the dead for decades. Doctors will always miss some diagnoses. Progress is a matter of ever narrowing the list of things doctors miss — so…
photo: Philip Todeldano for the New York Times Part of any real healthcare reform will be improving practices in hospitals, and — as Obama’s proposed commission on comparative effectiveness would do — identifying what works and what doesn’t. Knowing what works and why people get better or not is vital to good medicine. But amid…
[note: addition/corrections at bottom added an hour after orig post. additions underlined. deletions struckthrough. See *] Meet the meta-placebo: A new study suggests that ADHD meds do much of their work by producing placebo effects — and more constructive behavior — among the parents, teachers, and other caretakers of the kids actually taking the meds.…
A New York Times piece by Atul Gawande gives some good news and bad news about a life-saving checklist developed to prevent fatal infections in intensive care units. The good news: A year ago, researchers at Johns Hopkins University published the results of a program that instituted in nearly every intensive care unit in Michigan…