medicine
j7uy5 | February 13, 2009A minor controversy has erupted over the health care provisions that
were slipped in to the economic stimulus bill without discussion.
It has provisions such that..
Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a
federal system...One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of
Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure
your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and
cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and "guide" your doctor's
decisions.
This verbiage is found in a
href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039…
oracknows | February 12, 2009I would like to thank all of you who have notified me of the decision for the three test cases in the Autism Omnibus hearings before the Vaccine Court. Science actually won in the courts, something you just can't count on with any reliability. It even won resoundingly. I also realize that, as much as it still shocks me, a lot of people look forward to what I have to say on this issue, as I've become one of the main "go-to" bloggers on all things vaccine. Normally, I'd be all over this, reading the decision in detail, culling choice quotes, and spreading my special brand of Respectful and not-…
oracknows | February 12, 2009Last night, I lambasted Countdown host Keith Olbermann for having been played by the antivaccine movement and having unjustly slimed British journalist Brian Deer. Clearly, Olbermann was so blinded by his hatred of Rupert Murdoch that all chief apologist for the antivaccine movement, former freelance journalist David Kirby, had to do was mention that The Times of London, the newspaper that published Brian Deer's excellent investigative report nailing anti-MMR guru Andrew Wakefield to the wall for falsifying data, is owned by Rupert Murdoch, and it was like waving the proverbial red cape in…
oracknows | February 12, 2009Today is Darwin Day. But, more than that, it is a very special Darwin Day in that it is the 200th anniversary of the birth of evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin. This day is meant to celebrate not just the life, but especially the discoveries, of Charles Darwin. His theory of evolution by natural selection, is one of the most elegant examples of science in history. Darwin's theory was so robust that subsequent discoveries did not invalidate it. Rather, many were either predicted or easily accommodated in evolutionary theory, and many more complemented it, such that, in the early 20th…
oracknows | February 11, 2009Stick a fork in Keith Olbermann. He's done.
He has now officially degenerated into a liberal version of Rush Limbaugh, except that Rush Limbaugh is occasionally funny. Maybe he's more like Sean Hannity, particularly in his apparent dedication to the truth, or, rather, lack thereof. Hannity detests liberals and will immediately attack on the slightest pretense, even if the information given to him of "liberal wrongdoing" is dubious or outright wrong. Like Hannity, Olbermann will never turn down an opportunity to attack Bill O'Reilly or his paymaster Rupert Murdoch. Somtimes it's justified, but…
palmd | February 11, 2009There's been some pretty cryptic talk on ScienceBlogs over the last day or so, which brings up some topics that may seem obscure to some readers.* Worse, it gives an appearance that bloggers are engaged in some sort of self-indulgent flame war over minutiae. Let me help draw a guide for those of you who care (and I will try to make clear why all of you should care).
First, I hate debates about "discourse". When we argue about how we argue, we often lose track of the meat of the issue. But discourse is not irrelevant. More on this in a bit.
Medicine was traditionally a male-dominated…
oracknows | February 11, 2009I have to say, this is getting monotonous.
Let me back up a minute. One of the most common beliefs among users and advocates of "complementary and alternative" medicine (CAM) is that supplementation with vitamins will have all sorts of beneficial health effects. True, this belief is also pervasive among people who wouldn't go to an acupuncturist if you held a gun to their head, but it has become most associated with CAM. That this is so can actually be viewed as evidence of just how successful CAM activists have been in completely yoking all manner of lifestyle interventions to prevent or…
ddobbs | February 11, 2009A former: drug rep explains :
Samples are the number one influencer of the prescribing habits of doctors, and I proved this with my last pharma company, which was a very small one, where doctors could request samples simply by faxing in a form off of the company%u2019s website. I became the third best rep in sales out of 200 within six weeks, and never made one call on a doctor%u2019s office. I mailed these forms anonymously instead to the offices in my territory.
Dan A.
At DrugRepTime, hat tip to PharmaGossip.
oracknows | February 10, 2009I'm not as big a fan of Keith Olbermann as I used to be. Indeed, sometimes he strikes me as the liberal version of Rush Limbaugh, not to mention a blowhard. However, occasionally, he still has it, and when he's on, no one skewers the dishonest better than he does. For instance, after a media flack and the usual inclusion of Bill O'Reilly as runners up, meet Andrew Wakefield, the Worst Person in the World for February 10, 2009:
*/
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
That about sums it up right now.
I wonder how long before the antivaccinationist loons…
ddobbs | February 10, 2009Marcia Angell makes it plain:
The fact that drug companies pay prescribers to be "educated" underscores the true nature of the transaction. Students generally pay teachers, not the reverse. The real intent is to influence prescribing habits, through selection of the information provided and through the warm feelings induced by bribery. Prescribers join in the pretence that drug companies provide education because it is lucrative to do so. Even free samples are meant to hook doctors and patients on the newest, most expensive drugs, when older drugs -- or no drug at all -- might be better for…
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…
amillikan | February 10, 2009The author of the 1998 paper that fueld the anti-vaccination movement by asserting a link between MMR vaccinations and autism was recently found to have falsified his original data. The Sunday Times reports that the study's author Andrew Wakefield "changed and misreported results in his research" which was originally published in The Lancet medical journal in 1998. "He is the man who almost single-handedly launched the scare over the MMR vaccine in Britain," wrote ScienceBlogger Orac from respectful Insolence in his coverage of this revelation.
Related ScienceBlogs Posts:
Scientific…
oracknows | February 10, 2009Poor Jeni Barnett.
You remember Jeni Barnett, don't you? She's the U.K. radio host whose ill-informed rants against vaccines Ben Goldacre exposed so gloriously last week. Unfortunately, the price Ben paid consisted of threats of legal action for "copyright infringement" in the form of his having posted audio of the relevant segment of Barnett's show. Yes, LBC, the radio station on which Barnett's show runs, threatened to sue, forcing Ben to take down the audio. However, as almost always happens when a blogger is threatened in such a manner, the specter of legal action led to the audio files…
palmd | February 10, 2009There's a lot of talk about there about "economic stimulus" and "infrastructure", but what is "infrastructure"? Traditionally, it's the basic physical and social structure needed for a society to operate. Roads, sewers, utilities, schools---these are the "guts" of our nation. Without these things, and the pooling of resources they require, we are nothing more than an anarchic collective coexisting on a shared continent. Much of what is defined as infrastructure is about the basics of life---food and its distribution, public health, safety. How is health care not a part of that?
When we…
oracknows | February 10, 2009Because of the fallout from the revelation by Brian Deer that very likely Andrew Wakefield, hero of the antivaccine movement but, alas for his worshipers, one of the most dishonest and incompetent scientists who ever lived, had almost certainly falsified data for his infamous 1998 Lancet paper that launched a decade-long anti-MMR hysteria that shows no signs of abating, I ended up not coming back to a story I was very interested in. Although this story is about Holocaust denial, the questions raised by it are applicable not only to history and Holocaust denial, but to any area of science or…
ddobbs | February 9, 2009The Times' Economix blog has a good post by Alan Krueger on the need toinclude patients' lost time in estimates of health-care costs.
After waiting more than an hour in a doctor's waiting room, a friend of mine once presented his doctor with a bill for his time..... Although it doesn't currently enter into our national statistics, the time that patients spend getting health care services should be reflected in the way we calculate America's national health care expenditures.....Time spent interacting with the medical system could be used for other activities, like work and leisure. Moreover…
palmd | February 9, 2009I keep pandagon.net on my google reader. I don't agree with everything I read there, which is a good thing, but I do respect Amanda Marcotte's opinions (and they are always well-written).
I must take some exception with her recent analysis of the octuplet fiasco. It's not just that I have a problem with blaming everything bad on Teh Patriarchy (which I do), but I think that sometimes dealing with patriarchy distracts from other real issues. Yes, sexism and patriarchy are important in society, but not everything is that simple. Let's take a look (emphasis mine):
At this point in time, I…
palmd | February 9, 2009Via Tara Parker-Pope at NYT I learned of a little economics piece in the same paper. It looks into the economics and cost of waitng for health care services.
No one like waiting at the doctor. I've heard many people say, "Well, if he is going to use up my valuable time, then I'm sending him a bill."
While I appreciate the sentiment, it's not that the doctor thinks her time is more valuable than yours; it's not a matter of your time vs. the doctor's. It's yours vs. the other patients. All of a doctor's patients compete for the reletively limited resource of her time. There may be a few…
terrasig | February 9, 2009I know that many of you have seen this article by Matthew Perronne since it was picked up by the majority of AP outlets this morning:
Two drugmakers spent hundreds of millions of dollars last year to raise awareness of a murky illness, helping boost sales of pills recently approved as treatments and drowning out unresolved questions -- including whether it's a real disease at all.
Key components of the industry-funded buzz over the pain-and-fatigue ailment fibromyalgia are grants -- more than $6 million donated by drugmakers Eli Lilly and Pfizer in the first three quarters of 2008 -- to…
ddobbs | February 9, 2009Check this very scary projection of what current trends in health-care spending will mean for our economy: a growing weight that will account for half of GDP by 2082:
Peter Orszag, Obama's budget director, shows that slide in his standard talk on what's wrong with our budget. It shows why, as Ezra Klein puts it,
an odd bedfellows coalition of centrist economists ranging from Dean Baker to Henry Aaron to Paul Krugman to, well, Peter Orszag and Jason Furman have been forcefully arguing that there is no such thing as an "entitlement crisis." Social Security is safe. The crisis is in Medicare.…