Trust your gut: If anyone hypes a diet to you, saying it’s beneficial because it’s somehow tailored to the makeup of your complex, prehistoric, and individual intestinal microbiome, just wink and walk off. You know better, right?
Healthnewsreview.org, the watchdog about accuracy of medical news reports, rightly has taken after the Wall Street Journal for its recent story headlined, “The Food that Helps Fight Depression.”
Writer Michael Joyce reported about the WSJ piece:
Americans are showing with their feet and their money how they feel about doctors’ offices and shiny hospitals, places they’re shunning more and more. They’re racing to neighborhood clinics and urgent care centers that seem to be popping up on every suburban street corner and shopping mall.
Before these facilities transform U.S. health care, would it be worth asking what this trend might mean, not just for profit-seeking retailers, drug store chains, and, yes, also hospitals and doctors who are shifting into new lines of business?
The New York Times found that:
Big Medicine can paper over its troubles with basic fairness by slapping fancy terms on them: take “health and gender disparities,” for instance. But doctors, hospitals, and the rest of us can’t make medical care more equitable, accessible, safe, and affordable without looking at inequities, square on.
That’s why the New York Times, Washington Post, and Associated Press deserve credit for recent deep digs into the struggles of women, poor women, and especially black women with modern medicine:
Even as the nation enters an even scarier phase in its battle against the raging opioid abuse epidemic, new and sterner warnings are flying about antidepressants. The costs of these powerful drugs add up, as does the toll of depression and its care. Users say antidepressants are a nightmare to get off of. And medical experts cast growing doubt about whether their benefits outweigh their risks.
The New York Times deserves credit for detailing the worrisome plight of an estimated 15.5 million Americans who have been taking antidepressants — sold as brand drugs like Zoloft, Effexor, Paxil, Prozac, and Cymbalta — for at least five years. The rate of the psychiatric medications’ use “has almost doubled since 2010, and more than tripled since 2000,” the newspaper reported, adding that “nearly 25 million adults … have been on antidepressants for at least two years, a 60 percent increase since 2010.”
Users who try to wean themselves from the drugs find themselves, fast, in nasty situations with “dizziness, nausea, headache and paresthesia — electric-shock sensations in the brain that many people call brain zaps,” patients told the New York Times.
Big Tobacco, Big Sugar, and technology may be targeting the well-being of young people faster than regulators can prevent them from heading back to the future in a bad way: Teens getting hooked on nicotine, while tots take in excess calories with super sweet breakfast cereals.
The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times each have big take-outs, reporting on the “explosive” and “epidemic” trend, mostly by more affluent teens, of vaping with so-called e-cigarettes, notably a hot new device called the Juul.
It’s about the size of a computer flash drive, and it uses fruity-flavored liquids to deliver a jolt of nicotine — more than what users might get by puffing a pack of old-fashioned cigarettes.
Although the United States remains the world’s most affluent nation, it also is a country where money plays a driving, negative role in its people’s well-being. Sudden financial losses may shorten some Americans’ lives, while dismal finances may keep many others from seeking medical care.
So why are politicians still pushing to slash the nation’s social safety net, even as millions of individuals and families are voting with their wallets to protect their health?
Lethal ‘wealth shocks’
Hospitals may be providing us all with too many causes for high anxiety, with reports on increasing findings of “nightmare” bacteria stalking more health care facilities than had been known, more disclosures about how taxpayers may foot an even bigger bill to deal with a beleaguered public hospital in Washington, D.C., and a respected reform advocate’s detailing of just how traumatizing many hospital stays may be.
Let’s start with the new research by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a study that tried to determine just how many cases there might already be of patients infected in hospitals, nursing homes, and other medical care facilities with so-called Superbugs, bacteria that resist treatment not only with most standard antibiotics but also drugs that are deemed therapies of last resort. These include three types of bacterial infections deemed especially urgent but difficult to control: Clostridium difficile (C. difficile), aka C-diff; carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CREs, as shown above); and Neisseria gonorrhoeae.
CDC officials weren’t sure how many of the Superbug cases — which leave doctors and hospitals little option but to provide only supportive care — they might detect by scrutinizing records from pathology labs nationwide.
Our nation’s lethal opioid epidemic is reaching its tentacles right into our paychecks, as employers face rising health insurance costs that crimp their ability to give pay raises to the rest of us. This is happening even as we are being urged to carry overdose antidotes, just in case.
The independent, nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation reported that its new analysis of large employer insurance claims shows that American businesses paid $2.6 billion in 2016 to treat opioid addiction and overdoses by their covered workers and dependents. That compares to $273 million in 2004, so it’s up ten-fold in a decade.
The costs of caring for opioid abuse skyrocketed, even as employer health insurance saw sharp declines in the number and expense for prescriptions and use of powerful painkillers.
If Americans want to battle obesity, including among youngsters, one place to start is avoiding unhealthy food products hawked relentlessly by major league sports advertisers.
Weight woes plague grownups and show no signs of letting up — they’re increasing, instead, with 40 percent of Americans found to be obese in 2015 and 2016, a sharp increase over a decade earlier. The picture’s no prettier for young people, with the latest federal data showing the percentage of children ages 2 to 19 who are obese increased from 14 percent in 1999 to 18.5 percent in 2015 and 2016.
With studies showing that junk food and empty calories contribute significantly to making the nation an excessive waist-land, Vox, an online information site, deserves credit for pointing out how pervasive, insidious, and even accepted it has become for sports fans — especially young enthusiasts — to be barraged by advertising for fast and unhealthful meals, sugar-laden drinks and cereals, and foods full of fats, empty calories, and excess salt.
Although Republicans have ripped at the health insurance offered under the Affordable Care Act, a less known but also important aspect of Obamacare may soon benefit Californians. This West Coast ACA-related move also may be worth watching by patients and medical safety advocates, as well as employers and insurers.
The Golden State, the San Francisco public radio station KQED reported, soon will tell hospitals that “time’s up” for them to improve their care, and, if they fail to hit new quality and safety targets that will be part of an impending three-year contract with Covered California, the ACA marketplace operator, they will get the boot from Obamacare coverage.
Because bluer-than-blue Democratic California has gone all-in in supporting and putting ACA coverages in place, the state’s Obamacare exchange is big (more than 1 million customers and 11 approved companies) and lucrative — so much so hospitals and insurers can’t ignore the quality demands. They’re neither extreme nor should they be surprising, because state officials emphasize they have consulted with key parties for several years now in the “Smart Care California” collaborative about the plans they intend to put in place.
DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog