Scratchpad of a medical student.
“I believe primary care docs are rebelling against the system. The system has made primary care physicians suffer emotionally and financially. The system has taken the greatest form of medical care – that consisting of continuity, comprehensiveness, complexity and completeness – and denigrated it.”
“Science is based on trust. Without trust, research cannot function and evidence based medicine becomes a folly. Journal editors, peer reviewers, readers, and critics have all based their responses to Wakefield’s small case series on the assumption that the facts had at least been honestly documented. Such a breach of trust is deeply shocking.”
via marco.
“Obama’s legislation comes from an alternative idea, begun under the Eisenhower administration and developed under Nixon, of a market for health care based on private insurers and employers. Eisenhower locked in the tax break for employee health benefits; Nixon pushed prepaid, competing health plans, and urged a requirement that employers cover their employees. Obama applies Nixon’s idea and takes it a step further by requiring all Americans to carry health insurance, and giving subsidies to those who need it. So don’t believe anyone who says Obama’s health care legislation marks a swing of the pendulum back toward the Great Society and the New Deal. Obama’s health bill is a very conservative piece of legislation, building on a Republican rather than a New Deal foundation. The New Deal foundation would have offered Medicare to all Americans or, at the very least, featured a public insurance option.”
— Robert Reich (via azspot) (via marco)
via alimentary.
This is sooo cool… and pretty. I love how the information is presented (though I haven’t looked into how accurate/subjective the data are).
9. Health Insurance Companies are Against Healthcare Reform
7. Crocodile Tears for Primary Care
6. Healthcare Reform Will Lead to Rationing
4. The Uninsured Cause ER Overcrowding
Later parent-set bedtimes and correspondingly shorter sleep durations appear to be related to the development of depression in adolescents, a cross-sectional analysis showed.
via @kevinmd
The Biography Of A Medication
This is the story of how pills for osteopenia ended up in Benghauser’s medicine cabinet, and in the medicine cabinets of millions of women like her all over the United States. But more broadly, it’s the story of how the definition of what constitutes a disease evolves, and the role that drug companies can play in that evolution.
Osteopenia is a condition that only recently started to be thought of as a problem that required treatment. Until the early 1990s, only a handful of people had even heard the word. And to understand how osteopenia was transformed from a rarely heard word into a problem that millions of women swallow pills to treat, you need to go back to the beginning, to a place very far away from Benghauser’s suburban Virginia home.
Would anorexia have so quickly become part of Hong Kong’s symptom repertoire without the importation of the Western template for the disease? It seems unlikely. Beginning with scattered European cases in the early 19th century, it took more than 50 years for Western mental-health professionals to name, codify and popularize anorexia as a manifestation of hysteria. By contrast, after Charlene fell onto the sidewalk on Wan Chai Road on that late November day in 1994, it was just a matter of hours before the Hong Kong population learned the name of the disease, who was at risk and what it meant.
Cool timeline of the history of western medicine.
The Susan G. Komen for the Cure organization was among those asked if it was responsible. Andrea Rader, a spokeswoman for the group, said it did not launch the effort but called it “a terrific tool for raising awareness.”
“We just hope people act on it,” Rader said. “Get educated. Get a mammogram.”
