Since the dawn of e-mail, patients have been pleading for more doctors to offer medical advice online. No traffic jams, no long waits, no germ-infested offices with outdated magazines and bad elevator music. But most health insurers wouldn't pay for it. In recent weeks, Aetna Inc., the nation's largest insurer, and Cigna Corp. have agreed to reimburse doctors for online visits. Other large insurers are expected to follow, experts say.
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine says patients with abdominal aortic aneurysms--a deadly weakening in the blood vessel that fuels the lower half of the body--are most likely to live and quickly recover if they are treated with stents instead of surgery. That's good news for Medtronic Inc., which is one of the leading makers of aortic stents.
When surgeons implanted electrodes in his brain, the 50-year-old man was suddenly transported to a moment three decades earlier. He was in a park with friends, and could see the clothes they were wearing and what the weather was like. The discovery was an accident, but the team hopes it might lead to better care for patients with memory disturbances.
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt has proposed a $150 million incentives plan to expand physicians' use of electronic medical records. The five-year project would reward doctors in smaller practices who begin filing patients' health history electronically. Those who do so would get more Medicare money, but Leavitt did not specify how much. A dozen communities nationwide can apply to be in the pilot program.
A new Pfizer Inc. HIV drug will soon be reformulated in an effort to prevent the transmission of the virus. The New York drug maker is expected to announce that it will license its new medicine, Selzentry, to a nonprofit that investigates ways to turn HIV medicines for infected patients into vaginal substances to prevent transmission to women during sex. The partnership offers a low-risk way for Pfizer to find out if the medicine could become a frequently taken drug, while potentially offering an empowering concept to women in the developing world.
Doctors at about half of the 17 research centers involved in a study of the Prodisc, an artificial spinal disk, had more than a medical interest in the outcome. They stood to profit financially if the Prodisc succeeded, according to confidential information from a patient's lawsuit settled last year. The companies behind the disks and the surgeons who were willing to comment say the researchers' financial interests had no impact on findings of the research, which they say have been published in various peer-reviewed medical journals.