Executions, Doctors, The U.S. Supreme Court, And The Breath Of Kings
I. Glenn Cohen: The relationship between medicine and capital punishment has been a persistent feature of this past year in health law, both at the level of medical ethics and Supreme Court review
On July 23, 2014, Arizona encountered a problem with the same drug in the execution of Joseph Wood, wherein the condemned inmate allegedly gasped for almost two hours before dying.
The executions have prompted two important but different kinds of responses. In this post I write about the role of medical ethics and the U.S. Supreme Court's response.
In an opinion from 1994, dissenting from the denial of certiorari in the death penalty case of Callins v. Collins, Justice Harry Blackmun famously wrote, "From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death," and concluded that he was instead "obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed."
Health Affairs Blog
Infections of the Mind
why anti-vaxxers just 'know' they're right. Thom Scott-Phillips: Anti-vaccination beliefs can cause real, substantive harm, as shown by the recent outbreak of measles in the US. These developments are as shocking and distressing as their consequences are predictable. But if the consequences are so predictable, why do the beliefs persist?
Anti-vaccination beliefs can cause real, substantive harm, as shown by the recent outbreak of measles in the US. These developments are as shocking and distressing as their consequences are predictable. But if the consequences are so predictable, why do the beliefs persist?
It is not simply that anti-vaxxers don't understand how vaccines work (some of them may not, but not all of them). Neither are anti-vaxxers simply resistant to all of modern medicine (I'm sure that many of them still take pain killers when they need to). So the matter is not as simple as plain stupidity. Some anti-vaxxers are not that stupid, and some stupid people are not anti-vaxxers. There is something more subtle going on.
Naïve theories
We all have what psychologists call "folk" theories, or "naïve" theories, of how the world works. You do not need to learn Newton's laws to believe that an object will fall to the floor if there is nothing to support it. This is just something you "know" by virtue of being human. It is part of our naïve physics, and it gives us good predictions of what will happen to medium-sized objects on planet earth.
Your Doctor Likely Orders More Tests Than You Actually Need
Of the 435 ER physicians asked about the tests they order for their patients, more than 85% admitted that in general, they call for too many tests, even if they know the results won't really help them decide how to treat their patients
"So many physicians acknowledged that they ordered tests for no medical reason, which makes it clear that physicians feel enormous pressure to behave in a way they may not want to," says Dr. Hemal Kanzaria, an emergency room physician at University of California Los Angeles and lead author of the study.
Such unnecessary testing is contributing to an estimated $210 billion in additional health care costs; ideally, appropriately used testing should reduce costs by detecting and diagnosing problems early, so patients can get the right treatments and avoid more expensive care.
The top two reasons the doctors ordered these tests were fear of missing something that would help them diagnose their patients, and protection against malpractice. "The over-testing is not due to lack of knowledge on the physicians' part or poor medical judgment. It more likely reflects the fact that as a society, we don't like uncertainty, and that has led to an oversimplification of medical care," says Kanzaria. "There is the thought that if there is any possibility of disease, then we should do something about it, and if there is any doubt, we should test. If the test helps one patient, then everyone should get the test." So even when doctors know that a test won't add much information to their treatment decision, they're more concerned that the patient will want to know why the test wasn't performed.
Ebola Crisis Brutally Exposed Failures of the Aid System, Says MSF
WHO unwilling to assume responsibility for robust Ebola reponse, and governments of Guinea and Sierra Leone contributed to loss of life, according to Médecins Sans Frontières report
Monday, March 23rd, 2015
The Ebola crisis has brutally exposed the "age-old failures" of the humanitarian aid system with the World Health Organisation and governments repeating the mistakes of past public health emergencies, the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has said.
In a highly critical report on Monday, marking the first anniversary of the official outbreak in west Africa, the charity said the governments of Guinea and Sierra Leone obstructed the early response and contributed to the loss of life.
"The Ebola outbreak has often been described as a perfect storm: a cross-border epidemic in countries with weak public health systems that had never seen Ebolabefore," said MSF general director Christopher Stokes.
"Yet this is too convenient an explanation. For the Ebola outbreak to spiral this far out of control required many institutions to fail. And they did, with tragic and avoidable consequences."
NFL Doc: Youth Football Is Safer Than Riding a Bike
The NFL has gotten all sorts of bad publicity about concussions lately. So an NFL doctor is reassuring everyone that the worries are overblown
Earlier this week, Chris Borland, a standout 24-year-old NFL player, retired due to concerns about concussions and the neurodegenerative disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy(CTE).
In response, Pittsburgh Steelers team neurosurgeon Joseph Maroon appeared on NFL Network on Tuesday to downplay the league's concussion problem. "The problem of CTE, although real, is being over-exaggerated," he said. "It's a rare phenomenon." Maroon also claimed the NFL has "never been safer."
Do TV Cooking Shows Make Us Fat?
If you've ever watched Giada de Laurentiis make gooey chocolate-hazelnut spread or a rich carbonara pasta dish, you may have wondered: How can she cook like this and maintain her slim figure? Well, sorry to say, but a new study published in the journal Appetite suggests that many of of us home cooks who watch cooking shows can't pull this off
"Our main finding is that it seems that if you watch food television and then actually cook the recipes that you see, you're at risk for having a higher BMI [body mass index]," says study author Lizzy Pope, who's a researcher in nutrition and food science at the University of Vermont.
Pope, along with colleagues at Cornell University, surveyed about 500 women in their 20s and 30s. The researchers asked a range of questions about the women's cooking habits. And they documented the women's weight and height to calculate their BMIs.
"In terms of weight, those who watched cooking shows and cooked frequently from scratch had a mean weight of 164 lbs," according to the paper. By comparison, women who watched the shows but didn't cook much from scratch weighed, on average, about 153 pounds.
National Public Radio: The Salt Blog
Under Obamacare, America's uninsured rate has fallen 35 percent
A new report from Health and Human Services finds that the uninsured rate has fallen from 20.3 percent prior to the health-care law down to 13.2 percent at the start of 2015. This is a 7.1 percentage-point decrease in the uninsured rate — or, to put it another way, a 35-percent decline in the number of Americans who lack insurance coverage
A new report from Health and Human Services finds that the uninsured rate has fallen from 20.3 percent prior to the health-care law down to 13.2 percent at the start of 2015. This is a 7.1 percentage-point decrease in the uninsured rate — or, to put it another way, a 35-percent decline in the number of Americans who lack insurance coverage.
"Nothing since the implementation of Medicare and Medicaid has come close to this kind of change," says Richard Frank, assistant secretary for evaluation and planning at Health and Human Services.
The decline in coverage has coincided with two big Obamacare programs. First, there was the part of the law that required employers to offer dependent coverage up through age 26. Since that program began in 2010, the uninsured rate among young adults (Americans between the ages of 19 and 26) has dropped from 34.1 percent to 26.7 percent.
Vaccines Face Same Mistrust That Fed Ebola
As researchers try to compress a clinical process that can take a decade into a fraction of the time, they are confronting the same volatile mix of skepticism, fear, false rumor and understandable mistrust that helped spread Ebola in the first place
Now, the United States is helping to lead a large study of two vaccines against Ebola. But as researchers try to compress a clinical process that can take a decade into a fraction of the time, they are confronting the samevolatile mix of skepticism, fear, false rumor and understandable mistrust that helped spread Ebola in the first place.
"When we look at Ebola, it came from America," said Sylvester George, a pastor's assistant, expressing doubts about the clinical trials at an information session. "It's a man-made virus. So why didn't they do this trial in America, but they decide to come to Liberia?"
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