Americans can’t stop chowing down on fast foods, despite years of warnings about their health harms.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that 36.6 percent of Americans — 37.9 percent of men and 35.4 percent of women — eat some kind of fast food on any given day.
As the Los Angeles Times reported:
The medical establishment needs to take a hard, long look at its failing efforts to combat obesity and overweight, conditions that now affect just under 40 percent of American adults (93.3 million people) and 20 percent of youngsters (13.7 million) in the U.S.
That’s because doctors and medical scientists have “ignored mountains of evidence to wage a cruel and futile war on fat people, poisoning public perception and ruining millions of lives,” Michael Hobbes has reported in a long, strong story on the Huffington Post.
Hobbes has marshaled an array of available data to wag an unhappy finger at U.S. society, acting on conventional medical wisdom, for blaming and shaming those who are overweight or obese, contending that they lack self-control, discipline, and the personal fortitude to deal with what he says is clearly an uncontrolled medical and public health menace.
Doctors subject older patients to risky, costly, invasive, and painful tests and treatments, perhaps with good intention but also because they fail to see that the seniors in their care are individuals with specific situations with real needs that must be considered.
If physicians too readily accept conventional wisdom in their field, for example, they may push patients 65 and older to take low-aspirin, with the popular but mistaken belief that this practice will help prevent heart attacks, strokes, and dementia. This doesn’t work, and, it increases the risk in seniors of “significant bleeding in the digestive tract, brain or other sites that required transfusions or admission to the hospital,” the New York Times reported.
The newspaper cited a trio of studies, published in the New England Journal of Medicine and based on “more than 19,000 people, including whites 70 and older, and blacks and Hispanics 65 and older. They took low-dose aspirin — 100 milligrams — or a placebo every day for a median of 4.7 years.”
Has one of the nation’s top health watchdogs awoken too late, barked too little, and, maybe won’t bite enough as Big Tobacco and its allies have addicted a generation of young people to nicotine?
Scott Gottlieb, commissioner of the federal Food and Drug Administration, captured extensive media attention by hitting the alarm button about “epidemic” vaping and teens’ use of e-cigarettes, notably the wildly trendy Juul device and others of its kind.
He said the FDA has acted against 1,300 retailers for peddling e-cigarettes and their liquid flavorings to underage customers. More key: The agency has told Juul and other leading makers that they have 60 days to show how they can keep their products out of the hands of customers 18 and younger — or the FDA may ban them from the market.
Common sense and moderation can matter a ton in maintaining good health, as recent news reports show, particularly with kids and concussions, middle-aged adults and heart disease, and collegiate alcohol abuse.
With youngsters returning to school and so many of them participating in sports and recreation programs, it’s good that the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued evidence-based guidance on protecting kids who suffer mild traumatic brain injury or what most of us would call concussions.
These injuries have become a growing concern for parents and young athletes. Sports leagues and sporting groups are coming to a time of reckoning with just how harmful head trauma can be.
When big hospitals and their doctors jostle with competitors in smaller and medium-sized facilities over who gets to perform an important and booming kind of surgery, it’s not a pretty sight — nor might it be obvious with which institutions patients ought to side.
Phil Galewitz of the independent, nonpartisan Kaiser Health News Service does consumers a service with his reporting on recent bureaucratic brawling in Baltimore before federal regulators charged with determining where surgeons may replace leaky valves without open heart procedures.
As Galewitz explains, surgeons and medical device makers for a few years now have worked together to develop a new way to fix defective valves for tens of thousands of patients too frail to undergo open heart operations that, among other things, involve getting their chests cracked open. Surgeons, instead, can snake a catheter through patients’ blood vessels, into their heart, and shove aside the leaking valve, replacing it with a new model.
Families dropping into Baltimore restaurants may be surprised by what is no longer on the children’s menu, thanks to an official mandate: sugary soft drinks.
At the behest of public health officials, Baltimore has become the largest US city and an East Coast pioneer in enforcing a new restaurant ordinance that makes water, milk, and 100 percent fruit juices the default drinks for youngsters.
Parents who really want their kids to have a sugar-laden soft drink can still get them, but the parent has to place the order. The idea is to get parents to pause and think, and nudge them toward healthier choices.
San Francisco voters, upholding their elected leaders’ enlightened lawmaking, bashed Big Tobacco and its interests, providing a potent primary election message to public health officials nationwide to curb the growing menace to young people posed by e-cigarettes and vaping.
By a 2-to-1 margin, Bay Area residents supported their Board of Supervisors’ tough ban — which may be the most stringent in the nation — on sales of flavored tobacco products, including vaping liquids packaged as candies and juice boxes, and menthol cigarettes.
Specialized liquids, peddled in flavors like bubble gum, chicken and waffles, and unicorn milk, are key to the youth craze for vaping, in which teens use small devices about the size of a computer flash drive to get a nicotine-fueled boost. They can, with standard hits from liquids in devices like the trendy Juul, regularly consume as much nicotine as is found in a pack of cigarettes.
It’s one thing when modern medicine becomes so hidebound that it struggles over shedding a bit of traditional doctors’ garb. But new information emerging about cardiology’s entrenched reliance on maverick surgeons and evidence-light therapies in treating heart problems raises real questions: Exactly what’s going on in this costly area of care?
Haider Warraich ── a cardiology fellow at Duke and author of “Modern Death,” a book exploring how technology and modern mores are changing patients’ end-of-life experiences ── deserves praise for raising major concerns about the too easy acceptance by doctors and surgeons of existing, device-based treatments for heart conditions. The headline on his Op-Ed in the New York Times summarizes well his tough point: Don’t Put That in My Heart Until You’re Sure It Really Works.
He, of course, points to recent challenges about the effectiveness of cardiac stents. They have been commonly used for years now ── in hundreds of thousands of surgeries ── supposedly to relieve blockages in patients with stable chest pain. But recent research has started to show they provide no benefit over drugs, and it was only after further study showed that a new kind of dissolving stent contributed to increased heart attack risks that the device maker pulled the already in-use product, Warrich notes.
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.
DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog