A doctor who can't prescribe drugs is like a fish that can't swim. It's usually a sign that something is wrong.
I wrote a post earlier this week about a Nieman Reports article by Dr. John Abramson, a clinical instructor at Harvard and outspoken critic of the pharmaceutical industry. After serving in the National Health Service Corps, Abramson worked as a family physician for 20 years in Massachusetts.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) on Friday gave an engaging speech on his health reform plan at the Association of Health Care Journalists conference in Seattle, getting in a nice laugh line when he called COBRA insurance “the only federal program named after a poisonous snake.”
Doctors see a lot of naked people.
It starts in medical school when they see a lot of dead naked people, and one would think that after cutting into a cadaver and examining body parts in great detail a naked body would lose a little of its allure.
Not so for Dr. Kamal F. Aboulhosn of Yakima, Wash.
The decision by Astra Zeneca to stop the so-called JUPITER trial of its Crestor cholesterol medication last year garnered a ton of press attention. The New York Times captured the general tone of the coverage with this lead on a front-page story.
Initiative 1000, the so-called "Death with Dignity Act," took effect in Washington state on March 5, after being approved by voters in November. And it has put hospitals in a strange position. Hospitals are considered the place where doctors and staff do everything in their power to keep a person alive. Now hospitals are being asked to allow their patients to kill themselves.
Dr. Neil Hollander of Huntington Beach, Calif., looked to be just another doctor who had misplaced his notes in November 2003 when he agreed to settle a Medical Board of California case by taking a record keeping course.
The catastrophic 6.3 magnitude earthquake in Italy, the recent 4.3 temblor near San Jose and a rash of small quakes in Southern California made me wonder about something I haven't thought about in quite a while: What's going on with hospital seismic safety in quake-prone California? We're already overdue for "the big one."
If you do a Google News search for the word "octomom," you will get more than 4,000 results on most days.
What is lost in much of the coverage of Nadya Suleman and her expanding brood is how completely expected this all should be. No one should be surprised that a woman with six kids could order up another eight more or that she could find a doctor willing to help her.
Public hospitals have been closing at an alarming rate. Last month, the troubled Martin Luther King Jr. Medical Center in Los Angeles announced it was preparing to reopen after years of quality concerns, but it has lived on the precipice for more than two decades.
