Group items tagged

"The movement is across all medical disciplines with 6.8 percent of all physicians planning to stop taking insurance in favor of concierge-style medicine or so-called 'direct primary care.'.... "Already, one in five physicians is restricting the number of Medicare patients in their practice and one in three primary care doctors - the providers on the front lines of keeping the cost of seniors' care low - are restricting Medicare patients.... "Under direct primary care, doctors contract directly with patients to provide all of their primary care needs free of insurance interference at a price generally between $50 and $60 a month per patient. It's what the New York Times last spring called 'concierge for the masses' because it was much cheaper than the historically high cost of concierge medicine some Congressional investigators found to be $5,000 to $15,000 a year or more."

Offit gives Vioxx as a case in point. Vioxx, approved in 1999, was a huge hit for treating arthritis pain. It's a more refined version of the drugs in the same class as aspirin and ibuprofen, without causing the stomach bleeding that can make them dangerous. Tests showed it could raise the risk of heart attacks and Vioxx's maker pulled it off the market. "So which is more dangerous: Vioxx or vitamins? Indeed, both have dangers," Offit writes. "The better question is, why does everybody know that Vioxx can cause heart disease and nobody knows that megavitamins can cause cancer? The answer is that we have chosen not to know."

Imagine a world where everybody took their medicines and doctors prescribed only generic medications (when available)? According to a report by CVS Caremark, America would save billions of dollars every year.

The review, which appears this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine, covers 14 clinical trials that included more than 20,000 people with a history of cardiovascular disease. After pooling and re-analyzing the trial data, the researchers found no differences in the risk of new cardiac events or heart-related death in people taking fish oil supplements versus placebo.

In order for the nation to achieve goals set by the federal government for reducing obesity rates by 2020, children in the United States would need to eliminate an average of 64 excess calories per day, researchers calculated in a study published today in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. This reduction could be achieved by decreasing calorie intake, increasing physical activity, or both. Without this reduction, the authors predict that the average U.S. youth would be nearly four pounds heavier than a child or teen of the same age was in 2007-2008, and more than 20% of young people would be obese, up from 16.9% today.

Sec. 2607 is of concern to advocates of science-based medicine due to the broad scope of practice granted chiropractors, naturopaths, homeopaths, acupuncturists and direct-entry midwives under state law, as well as their over-confident view of themselves and their abilities. As we have previously discussed, for example, both naturopaths and chiropractors fancy themselves as primary care physicians able to differentially diagnose any patient with any disease or condition and, in many cases, treat or "co-manage" these patients.

The "autism biomed movement is almost all pseudoscience and quackery and ... much of it 'amounts to uncontrolled experimentation on children.'"

No, these two women were, as far as I can tell, offered help but refused it because it was standard conventional therapy. From what I can tell from various blog and Internet articles, they appear to have subjected Alex to biomedical quackery and were unhappy that if Alex were transferred to a psychiatric hospital's long-term care ward he would no longer be able to receive "autism biomed" treatments. Time and investigation by the authorities will tell if that was the case.