The starting salary of an orthopedic surgeon in the United States is $565,000. Family medicine physicians, by contrast, can expect a starting salary closer to $250,000, a good living by almost any measure, but a pay disparity that doesn’t strike most experts as reflecting the value, or importance, of these two specialties. If Kennedy wants…
People whose immune systems are temporarily or permanently weakened can be susceptible to colds. Consider chronic stress. Ask a group of college students about their emotional lives, and those who report higher levels of stress will be more susceptible to cold symptoms. We know that because researchers have exposed healthy college students to cold viruses…
Mammograms for breast cancer; the PSA blood test for prostate cancer; CT scans for lung cancer; and things like stool blood tests and colonoscopies for colon cancer. Each of these screening tests is designed to find cancers, or precancers, before they become symptomatic, the goal of early detection being to enable clinicians to eradicate growths…
Populations across many wealthy countries are aging. That means a huge swath of people will soon find themselves needing some kind of long-term care. Here is a quick look at what the aging of a population means for how much a country spends on long-term care. The data, published in the journal Health Affairs, come…
Sepsis is a brutal killer. It often starts after a microorganism gets loose in your bloodstream, spreading to organs far and wide, releasing deadly toxins along the way. In response, your body releases toxins of its own, chemicals designed to kill the invading organism but that, all too often, damage your body, too, leaving you…
Nine to twelve years. That’s about how long most drug companies have to make serious money on new products before their patent protection ends. Then, generic companies enter the fray and prices, typically, plummet. Yet, two decades after coming to market, Herceptin (a drug used to treat breast and stomach cancer) was still priced at…
Purdue Pharma launched OxyContin in 1996, and soon began an aggressive marketing campaign for this powerful and addictive drug. The campaign is over, but its effects are still deadly. How do we know this? Because Purdue’s marketing wasn’t sprinkled evenly around the country. Instead, Purdue rolled out its campaign in different markets at different times…
The patient arrived in my clinic, their right big toe the color of a spring strawberry. The lightest touch caused exquisite pain. Fortunately, I was able to prescribe a pill (an ancient medicine, actually) and the patient was better by the next day.
Too bad that simple treatment is becoming unaffordable, through a maddening combination of greed and regulatory failure.
Covid-19 killed approximately 60,000 young Americans between 15 and 54 years old in 2021. By any measure, that is an awful statistic, representing a staggering number of loved ones lost to the virus.
But as awful as that statistic is, guess what killed even more young Americans.
A whole industry is devoted to measuring, tracking and even incentivizing the quality of American hospital care. Unfortunately, that industry is horribly inefficient, costing us billions of dollars.
Quality measurement is inefficient in large part because there is no single source that hospitals (and provider systems, more generally) can use to track the quality of their care.