DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog

August 16, 2017

While other addictions hit crisis levels, we can’t ignore soaring alcohol woes

by Patrick A. Malone

It’s more than happy hour chardonnays with office mates or malt liquors at a summer barbecue.

Public health experts are warning that alcohol drinking is rising sharply, and in especially worrisome fashion for women, seniors, African Americans, Latinos, and Americans of Asian descent. As the nation struggles with addiction crises—especially a plague of opioid drug abuse—booze woes may be getting less than their deserved attention.

Our heavy and increasing alcohol consumption, as captured in a sizable and regular survey of Americans’ tippling habits, should be of big concern. That’s because experts note that it can “portend increases in many chronic co-morbidities in which alcohol use has a substantial role.”

August 13, 2017

D.C. hospital crackdown shows how patient safety information stays secret

by Patrick A. Malone

Health officials caught expectant mothers, local politicians, and the D.C. community off guard by ordering the only full-service hospital in the southeast part of the District of Columbia to stop delivering babies and to shut its nursery for 90 days.

Details weren’t provided as to why D.C. regulators slapped restrictions on United Medical Center’s obstetrics and nursery care license. The hospital itself has acknowledged that at least three incidents, which it says it cannot discuss due to rigorous federal patient privacy rules, prompted the official rebuke.

This shutdown provides a harsh reminder just how little the public gets to know about important issues affecting doctors, hospitals, and patient safety and quality care.

August 11, 2017

FDA, EPA jointly offer expectant parents counsel on safer fish eating

by Patrick A. Malone

If you’re an expectant mom trying to diversify your diet and to eat healthier this summer, two federal agencies are offering evidence-based advice about seafood dining: Use a little caution with servings of certain fish like king mackerel, marlin, shark, swordfish, and bigeye tuna that tend to carry higher levels of problematic mercury.

The federal Food and Drug Administration and Environmental Protection Agency have teamed up to revise their safe fish guidelines and to offer these in a handy guide to not only pregnant women but to all parents really.

The agencies say that fish can be a tasty, protein- and nutrient-rich part of Americans’ diets with grown-ups and kids encouraged to eat two to three servings or roughly 8- to 12-ounces-per-week. But fish also carry mercury traces, which “can be harmful to the brain and nervous system if a person is exposed to too much of it over time.”

August 10, 2017

A timely reminder that courageous (and lonely) caregivers need our care, too

by Patrick A. Malone

Pick up that phone. Dash off a text or an email. Issue a dinner invitation or make a date for a casual lunch. Or just drop by to see that friend or loved one who struggles with the burdens of caring for someone in poor physical or mental health.

Why now? Why not? Paula Spann deserves credit for her latest New York Times column highlighting the “unbearable” loneliness and isolation that caregivers confront as, other experts estimate, 43.5 million Americans provide $470 billion in tough, unstinting, and unpaid work for loved ones.

Even as they do so, however, they often must abandon their own careers and chunks of their own lives, watching with sadness as their social contacts and intellectual interests narrow, especially as their worlds become consumed with washing, feeding, entertaining, and keeping safe a spouse, grandparent, uncle, aunt, or other loved one. Their woes can be especially great if they’re caring for loved ones with the increasingly common and hugely demanding conditions of dementia and Alzheimer’s.

August 7, 2017

Eye safety will be a must while viewing Aug. 21 total eclipse of the sun

by Patrick A. Malone

Weather permitting, Washingtonians soon will get a good view of a full eclipse of the sun — not the whole thing but a good chunk. Here’s hoping that all viewers of this much-anticipated astronomical event take due precautions so they don’t damage their eyesight.

Residents around the nation’s capital can expect to see an 81 percent blockage of the sun at the peak of the Aug. 21 eclipse, not the full solar cover or “totality” that millions of Americans are planning and traveling to view in peak spots that fall in a 70-mile wide swath across the country from Oregon to South Carolina.

Be warned: Don’t think just because the sun overhead is mostly blocked that it is safe even then to stare upwards with unprotected eyes. That might leave a careless viewer in the district with crescent-shaped burns on the back of the eyes, says a vision expert and longtime aficionado who says he has seen 19 eclipses.

August 6, 2017

It’s a sad day when special interests crow about their sway on laws to cut patient access to civil justice

by Patrick A. Malone

Members of Congress and lobbyists are taking public and premature bows for debasing the nation’s democracy and potentially harming Americans’ health and well-being.

The Washington Post has given readers a disturbing glimpse into what’s going on in the halls of the U.S. House these days, detailing how Republican representatives jammed through a bill that would strip Americans of rights in seeking redress when they suffer harms while seeking medical services.

The GOP’s so-called “reforms” of the nation’s medical malpractice laws, which independent and expert analysts have said are unnecessary and won’t produce the magical cost-savings or medical care efficiencies that advocates suggest, were concocted by a coterie of special interests—a handful of doctors and insurance industry lobbyists, the Post reports.

August 4, 2017

With health care in tumult, patients should get their own records, GAO advises

by Patrick A. Malone

Although patients can protect their own health by getting copies of their medical records, few consumers get them, and fewer still take advantage of the federal government’s push to make records easily available electronically, one of Uncle Sam’s big public protection agencies reports.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office also warns that tumult in the nation’s health care system, notably in Congress’ roller-coaster deliberations to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, may disrupt patients’ relationships with caregivers. That makes it even more vital for consumers to have their health records.

The Association of Health Care Journalists deserves a tip of the cap for pointing to the GAO blog, where experts note that the ACA had supported a national push to get doctors and hospitals to adopt electronic health records with the aim of providing patients and caregivers more access and transparency about these crucial materials.

August 3, 2017

Money’s big for Big Pharma — in settlements, lobbying, and product prices

by Patrick A. Malone

Even as drug makers are settling or scrambling to resolve disputes with regulators over dubious ways they peddle products, Big Pharma is busting records for its spending to lobby lawmakers on skyrocketing prices, easing industry oversight, and other issues critical not only to the sector but also to tens of millions of consumers.

It’s distressing how news reports continue to show not only the flood of money in prescription drugs but also how medication makers put profit motives ahead of other concerns like the public interest.

Take for example the $280 million that Celgene has agreed to pay to settle fraud claims over its marketing of Thalomid and Revlimid for unapproved uses.

August 2, 2017

Post-mortem study confirms extensive damage to brains of NFL players

by Patrick A. Malone

Football players and fans, if they had doubts before, have taken yet another hit to their favorite sport, with a retrospective study of hundreds of pro players’ brains finding a damaging disorder in a startling percentage of the donated organs.

Experts reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that 110 of 111 brains of onetime players in the National Football League, examined by neuropathologists and other experts, showed evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. It’s a degenerative disease that experts think is caused by repeated head blows. It has been linked with multiple symptoms, including memory loss, confusion, depression and dementia. The problems can crop up long after the head trauma stops.

Caution needs to be exercised with this research because the athlete-brain donors and their families were extremely self-selecting. They participated in the post-mortem study, some with guarantees of confidentiality about identities, because they had experienced or started to show likely CTE-related debilitation before their deaths.

July 31, 2017

FDA announces major tactical shift in nation’s war on smoking

by Patrick A. Malone

The nation’s long war on one of its leading preventable killers has taken a surprising tactical turn, as the head of the federal Food and Drug Administration has declared that tobacco companies will face new regulations aimed at slashing nicotine in cigarettes.

FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb argues that cutting the noxious and addictive nicotine will help Americans unhook themselves from tobacco use, prompting less cigarette smoking, and, potentially increasing the use of possibly less harmful health vices, like nonburning “e-cigarettes” for vaping.

Gottlieb, at the same time, put further off a planned FDA crackdown on e-cigarette makers, delaying for several years requirements that they disclose ingredients in their colorful, flavored vaping liquids and demonstrate that they and other e-cigarette products do not cause health harms.