Insights

<p>When historians write the history of ghostwriting in U.S. medicine, they will mark Sept. 17, 2009 as pivotal.</p>

<p>Here's a quick description of my fellowship project:</p><p>The working title is "Unequal care: An investigation of health-care disparities in Wisconsin." By many measures, Wisconsin residents enjoy some of the best health care in America. The state was ranked ninth in the Commonwealth Fund's 2007 State Scorecard on Health System Performance, which "assesses state variation across key dimensions of health system performance: access, quality, avoidable hospital use and costs, equity, and healthy lives."</p>

Reading some books is like feeling a cool breeze wash over you on a sun-dappled beach as waves gently lap nearby.

The whole effect is soothing, restorative, healing.

But then there are other books which grab you with an urgency the way your mother’s voice called you by your full name when you were in trouble.

<p>Although gangs and gang violence have been reconceived in recent years as a public health problem requiring systemic cures---there is far less agreement on what those cures might be. While transforming the community conditions that produce gang violence is the purported goal for policy makers in Los Angeles, there is little consensus about what strategy or group of strategies are best suited to achieve this goal.</p>

<p>Hi all,</p><p>

Here is a basic outline of my project that I’d like to share with you guys. The project is consisted of three separated stories about health issues in the Asian Community.</p><p>

1. Domestic violence against seniors in the Chinese Community.</p>

<p>Even in his infamy, Dr. Daniel Carlat, founder of <a href="http://www.thecarlatreport.com/"><i>The Carlat Psychiatry Report</i></a>, is popular with drug companies. Carlat was <a href="http://www.rhapsody.com/player?type=undefined&amp;id=alb.27747126&amp;r… recently</a> by <a href="http://carlatpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2009/09/schering-plough-committed-…; to help promote a new drug.

<p>The medical examiner called Dr. Bernard N. Bass with some bad news: one of his<br /> patients had been found dead. Bass refused to sign the death certificate.</p>

<p>A reporter gets a call from the hypothetical Council for Making Sick Kids Smile about an event being sponsored on an otherwise sleepy Sunday. The reporter heads out to the event, hoping for a quick local page filler, and comes back to the newsroom with a great-sounding story with quotes from a well-spoken university professor and a teary mom and a photo of a sick and smiling child holding balloons nuzzling with a baby koala bear.</p>

<p>What reporters in this situation rarely ask is: who founded this council and why?</p>

<p>Dr. Daniel Carlat is a medical curiosity.</p>

<p>We have a guest blogger today: <a href="/users/dlee">Dan Lee</a>, former Riverside Press-Enterprise reporter and current student at the Annenberg School for Communication, is working for the California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships and ReportingonHealth.</p><hr /><p>By Daniel Lee</p><p>Reporters covering the health care reform debate have failed to adequately investigate the claims made by both Democratic and Republican leaders and could do more to focus on its local impacts, experts said Wednesday.</p>