medical care
ddobbs | February 10, 2009Reader Jay, in a comment on my post about health-care costs tanking the economy, raises an interesting question about the sorts of standardized medical records that would be needed to evaluate efficacy (and therefore economic efficiency) of various treatments:
The idea is clearly to have standardized health-care records systems so that data can easily be aggregated and analyzed
[he writes, quoting my post.]
That's a shift in priorities, away from records centered around benefit to the patient, a subtle but not insignicant difference. Broad based statistical research involves, though…
ddobbs | January 21, 2009
My brother, who started his medical career as a pulmonary tech at a naval hospital and is now the medical director for the National Disaster Medical System -- a system that draws heavily on medical personnel normally employed outside government -- sent me this account of his Inauguration Day, which he spent overseeing the NDMS care of the vast crowd on the Mall.
Allen's job that day, for which he spent months preparing, was to be ready for anything from stubbed toes and headaches to widespread medical disasters of the sort best not pondered (except by disaster relief people). The day…
grrlscientist | February 20, 2008tags: book review, HIV, AIDS, Africa, epidemic, public health, Helen Epstein, The Invisible Cure
"AIDS has come to haunt a world that thought it was incomplete. Some wanted children, some wanted money, some wanted property, some wanted power, but all we have ended up with is AIDS."
-- Bernadette Nabatanzi, traditional healer, Kampala, Uganda, 1994.
The occurrence of AIDS in East and southern Africa is uniquely severe: even though less than 3 percent of the world's population lives here, this region is home to more than 40 percent of all those people with HIV infections. Throughout much of the…