Colon cancer rates are rising among men and women under 50, the age at which guidelines recommend screenings start, a new analysis shows. One in seven colon cancer patients is under 50. Younger patients are more likely to have advanced stage cancer, but they live slightly longer without a cancer recurrence because they are treated aggressively, the researchers reported. "Colon cancer has traditionally been thought of as a disease of the elderly," said study lead author Dr. Samantha Hendren, an associate professor of surgery at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Ruth Miles, 83, sat in a wheelchair in a small exam room, clutching a water bottle, looking frightened and uncomfortable. She was submitting to the tender scrutiny of Dr. Elizabeth Eckstrom, who scooted her stool so close that she was knee to knee with her patient. Ms. Miles had broken her pelvis after tripping on an electric cord in her apartment. The weeks since then had been hellish, she told her doctor. At the rehab center, incapacitated and humiliated, she had cried for help from the bathroom. Her hands were covered with bruises from the blood thinners she was on.
Security researcher Beau Woods will never forget the day he got a call from the natal intensive care unit. The fetal heart monitors kept rebooting, putting infant lives at risk. The Zotob worm was big that year, and the malware—designed to steal credit card details, but so poorly coded that it caused the devices it affected to repeatedly reboot—had infected many machines at the hospital where he worked. The physicians felt powerless to do anything. Could Woods help? The Zotob authors were eventually apprehended and sent to prison. They clearly never intended their malware to hurt anyone, much less put premature babies in hospitals at risk. They were criminals looking to make a quick buck.
Each year more than one million Americans lose their doctors to suicide, and nobody ever tells patients the truth—the real reason they can't see their doctors ever again. Nobody talks about our doctors jumping from hospital rooftops, overdosing in call rooms, hanging themselves in hospital chapels. It's medicine's dirty secret—and it's covered up by our hospitals, clinics, and medical schools. No medical school wants to be known as the "Suicide School." No hospital wants to be #1 for interns jumping from rooftops. No student wants to become a doctor in order to kill themselves.
U.S. health inspectors have found serious deficiencies at Theranos Inc.'s laboratory in Northern California, according to people familiar with the matter. The problems were found during an inspection by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the chief federal regulator of clinical labs, at the blood-testing company's facility in Newark, Calif. Failing to fix the problems could put the Theranos lab at risk of suspension from the Medicare program. The inspection results are expected to be publicly released soon, these people said. A spokesman for the agency said it "can't confirm any survey conclusions or results at this time." [Subscription Required]
Emergency rooms are health care's front line - in the United States, nearly 45 out of 100 people visit an ER in any given year. But there's an issue brewing behind the scenes in emergency medical facilities, one that can't be fixed by a simple stitch or bandage. A new study published in the journal Academic Emergency Medicine shows that drug shortages in ERs across the United States increased by more than 400 percent between 2001 and 2014. The study analyzed data from the University of Utah Drug Information Service, which receives drug shortage reports submitted through a public site administered by the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists.