March 18, 2024
(NPR) – At a time when Americans consume more than half of their daily calories from ultra-processed foods, there is increasing evidence that eating too many of these foods can make us sick. A study published in the British Medical … Read More
March 18, 2024
(Wall Street Journal) – The Palestine Red Crescent Society estimated at the end of December about 12,000 people, including about 5,000 children, had lost one or more limbs because of the war in Gaza. The organization, based in the West … Read More
March 18, 2024
(New York Times) – A gang assault on Haiti’s capital has left an already weak health care system in tatters. More than half of the medical facilities in Port-au-Prince and a large rural region called Artibonite are closed or not … Read More
March 18, 2024
(The Washington Post) – People over 65 use more health care than other age groups and make up nearly half of hospital admissions. But there are just 7,300 board-certified geriatricians in the United States, which is fewer than 1 percent … Read More
March 18, 2024
(MIT Technology Review) – For too long, modern medicine has focused on treating disease rather than preventing it, they say. They believe that it’s time to move from reactive healthcare to proactive healthcare. And to do so in a credible … Read More
March 18, 2024
Hastings Center Report (vol. 54, Issue 1, 2024) is available online by subscription only. Articles include: “Identity Theft, Deep Brain Stimulation, and the Primacy of Post?trial Obligations” by Joseph J. Fins, et al. “Digital Humans to Combat Loneliness and Social … Read More
March 15, 2024
(Axios) – Food and Drug Administration advisers Friday will weigh the risk of premature patient deaths from adverse events when they consider expanding the use of two CAR-T therapies for multiple myeloma. Why it matters: CAR-T treatments have shown promise … Read More
March 15, 2024
(Axios) – New federal restrictions on a cancer-causing chemical that’s essential for sterilizing medical devices may have balanced out long-running concerns about protecting public health without choking the medical supply chain. But the tradeoffs won’t entirely go away until scientists … Read More
March 15, 2024
(New York Times) – Should your insurance company be allowed to stop you from getting a treatment — even if your doctor says it’s necessary? Doctors are often required to get insurance permission before providing medical care. This process is … Read More
March 15, 2024
(The Guardian) – Experts warn that a rare but dangerous bacterial infection is spreading at a record rate in Japan, with officials struggling to identify the cause. The number of cases in 2024 is expected to exceed last year’s record … Read More
March 15, 2024
(NPR) – Doctors have long complained about how the prior authorization process gets in the way of delivering care to patients. Insurance companies say the point is to make sure doctors prescribe the most cost effective treatments. States are responding … Read More
March 15, 2024
Journal of Medical Humanities (vol. 45, no 1, 2024) is available online by subscription only. Articles include: “Beyond Empathy to System Change: Four Poems on Health by Bertolt Brecht” by William MacGregor, Martin Horn and Dennis Raphael “Medical Pluralism as … Read More
March 14, 2024
(The Conversation) – I’m a cultural anthropologist who studies the ways feelings and beliefs circulate in American society. To investigate what’s behind mothers’ vaccine skepticism, I interviewed vaccine-skeptical mothers about their perceptions of existing and novel vaccines. What they told … Read More
March 14, 2024
(ABC News) – A new strategy to fight an extremely aggressive type of brain tumor showed promise in a pair of experiments with a handful of patients. Scientists took patients’ own immune cells and turned them into “living drugs” able … Read More
March 14, 2024
(NPR) – At a time when colorectal cancer is on the rise, a new study finds the disease can be detected through a blood test. The results of a clinical trial, published Wednesday, in The New England Journal of Medicine, … Read More
March 14, 2024
(STAT News) – A new study suggests the antiviral drug obeldesivir may be effective in curing Ebola Sudan infections, for which there are currently no approved vaccines or treatments. Scientists at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston tested … Read More
March 14, 2024
(Nature) – India’s experience with mucormycosis reflects a broader diagnostic predicament: many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) lack even the most basic tools for detecting the fungal diseases that kill an estimated 2.5 million people each year. Misdiagnosis often leads … Read More
March 14, 2024
The New England Journal of Medicine (vol. 390, no. 7, 2024) is available online by subscription only. Articles include: “Fundamentals of Medical Ethics: Ethical Issues in Providing Care in Safety-Net Health Systems” by D.A. Chokshi and F.P. Cerise “But My … Read More
March 13, 2024
(Nature) – Statistics from around the world are now clear: the rates of more than a dozen cancers are increasing among adults under the age of 50. This rise varies from country to country and cancer to cancer, but models … Read More
March 13, 2024
(New York Times) – H3C is just one of many examples showing that health care systems are increasingly starting to see benefits in building affordable and safe housing, from the improved health of local communities to how much managed care … Read More
March 13, 2024
(STAT News) – As she predicted, Smith was forced to choose her medication over her job. Within weeks, she was late on rent for the apartment she’s lived in for over a decade. In the ensuing three months, Smith dutifully … Read More
March 13, 2024
(NPR) – The proportion of state and federal prisoners who are 55 or older is about five times what it was three decades ago. In 2022, that was more than 186,000 people. In Oklahoma, the geriatric population has quadrupled in … Read More
March 12, 2024
(The Guardian) – Children who have gender dysphoria will no longer be given puberty blockers, NHS England has said, ahead of a radical change in how it cares for them. There is not enough evidence about either how safe they … Read More
March 12, 2024
(Business Insider via MSN) – A surgical team at a UK hospital used Apple’s Vision Pro headset to help execute a medical procedure. The team used the mixed-reality headset to assist in two microsurgical spine procedures at Cromwell Hospital in … Read More
March 11, 2024
(STAT News) – Hundreds of messages from an internal chat board for an international group of transgender health professionals were leaked in a think tank report last week and framed as revealing serious health risks associated with gender-affirming care, including … Read More