According to a study conducted at the Columbia University Medical Center, CT scans could be responsible for as much as 2 percent of all cancers in the United States in the next 20 to 30 years due the radiation exposure. The news was released amidst the Radiological Society of North America's annual meeting, and the RSNA responded by saying that while there is risk with CT, the potential benefits far outweigh them.
An Internet-based program called Telehealth can monitors patients with such chronic illnesses as congestive heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or diabetes. The program warns when certain individually determined thresholds are passed, such as blood pressure or blood sugar, and makes the daily information available to the patient's doctor and nurses.
Rural hospitals throughout Illinois be connected to a high-speed fiber-optic network aimed at improving healthcare by linking staff to the expertise and resources of much larger hospitals in the Chicago area.
In our November issue you will find a profile I prepared on Donald Hopkins, MD. Hopkins' work overseas eradicating the guinea worm disease takes place in impoverished areas where the technology we take for granted doesn't exist. The tools at his disposal are primitive ones, including screens used to filter water. That's one of the first steps toward eliminating the horrific disease.
Hopkins himself seems a bit uncomfortable in the modern age of technology. He has e-mail, but relies on an assistant to answer it for him. And he has little use for cell phones. Spam is part of the problem. Hopkins keeps a fax machine in his office and commented to me how many "junk faxes" he gets. It is a truism of information technology that it opens the floodgates to unwanted information. But there's more to it than that, he pointed out.
I asked Hopkins what it was like to have worked in such adverse conditions, then return to the United States, where affluence is widespread. He's clearly disturbed by the contrast, and commented about the tremendous amount of waste here. People routinely discard "old" clothes that might be the beginning of a brand new wardrobe in the third world. And we are served huge portions in restaurants when halfway around the globe, youngsters scrape by meal to meal.
Hopkins criticized our media for its celebrity "obsession," and for turning a deaf ear on international health issues that could be tackled if more resources were poured into the effort. Although he didn't say it, he was describing a society wallowing in its own fortunes, oblivious to those less fortunate around us.
No wonder Hopkins looks askance at modern information technology. It's not the technology so much as it is the information. "What makes the nightly news are stories that are photogenic, rather than things that are important for people to understand," he told me.
That underscores the mission of magazines like HealthLeaders. No matter how far off my technology beat I may wander, I will never have to write about Paris Hilton.
Sabatino Bianco, MD, director of the Trinity Mother Frances Neuroscience Institute in Tyler, TX, recently began performing an innovative procedure, the endoscopic transsphenoidal hypophysectomy, or ETH. The latest example of minimally invasive surgery, the procedure allows the removal of pituitary tumors through the nasal cavity. In this podcast, Bianco discusses ETH and the technology involved.
The case against Medtronic that will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court has wide-ranging implications for patients, doctors and device makers. Medtronic asserts that because the FDA has a rigorous approval process for medical devices, federal law "preempts" it from state claims relating to a device's safety and effectiveness. Lower courts have agreed.