A new state law will allow patients to learn more about their doctors' backgrounds and give the Missouri Board of Registration for the Healing Arts increased power to discipline incompetent physicians. Gov. Jay Nixon on Wednesday signed House Bill 265, giving the healing arts board more leverage to respond more quickly to doctors deemed a threat to public health. The bill was inspired by the 2010 Post-Dispatch series "Who Protects the Patients," an investigation into the state's lax and secretive system of doctor discipline. The new law takes effect Aug. 28. The healing arts board will then have greater authority to suspend the licenses of incompetent and impaired doctors by making it easier to prove that patients are at risk. Missouri law already allows the board to immediately suspend dangerous doctors, but the Post-Dispatch investigation found it had not done so in at least 25 years.
Should parents of extremely obese children lose custody for not controlling their kids’ weight? A provocative commentary in one of the nation’s most distinguished medical journals argues yes, and its authors are joining a quiet chorus of advocates who say the government should be allowed to intervene in extreme cases. It has happened a few times in the U.S., and the opinion piece in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association says putting children temporarily in foster care is in some cases more ethical than obesity surgery. David Ludwig, MD, an obesity specialist at Harvard-affiliated Children's Hospital Boston, said the point isn’t to blame parents, but rather to act in children’s best interest and get them help that for whatever reason their parents can't provide. State intervention “ideally will support not just the child but the whole family, with the goal of reuniting child and family as soon as possible. That may require instruction on parenting,” said Ludwig, who wrote the article with Lindsey Murtagh, a lawyer and a researcher at Harvard's School of Public Health.
The emergence of a strain of gonorrhea that can thwart the last antibiotic effective in treating the common sexually transmitted disease was bound to happen, experts say. The new, super-resistant strain is called H041, and so far, only a handful of cases are known in Japan. But don't count on it staying that way. Experience has shown that once a resistant strain of gonorrhea appears, it steadily displaces those that can be killed with antibiotics. It happened in the 1970s and 1980s with penicillin and tetracycline and more recently with a class of drugs called fluoroquinolones, such as Cipro.
Conventional wisdom holds you should try to stay out of the hospital in July if at all possible, since that's when new medical residents report for duty. But while there have been studies looking at the question -- like one published last year suggesting there are more fatal medication errors in July -- until now, there hasn't been a major review of the research on the topic. Researchers at the UCSF School of Medicine looked at 39 published studies and concluded that while there is mixed evidence, "our analysis suggests that mortality increases during the changeover months," says co-author John Young, associate program director of the residency training program in the school's department of psychiatry. Lower efficiency, as measured by longer hospital stays and surgical times and higher hospital charges, also seem to be a particular problem during the seventh month of the year.
Later this year, when the popular statin Lipitor becomes available as a generic drug, many who have taken it faithfully will get a surprise. No longer will their cholesterol-lowering pills be oblong and white. If they choose a generic alternative, their pills will be anything but that color and shape, and their appearance may change from refill to refill as pharmacists switch among generic competitors. The result may well be confusion among patients, who often take multiple drugs and have trouble keeping track of them if their shapes and colors change all the time, two researchers at Harvard University say. With generics accounting for 70% of all drugs on the market, the seldom-discussed issue of their ever-changing appearances affects almost anyone who fills a prescription.
Johnson & Johnson could shell out up to $1 billion for lawsuits concerning its subsidiary DePuy Orthopaedics and the metal-on-metal hip implants that were found to shed minute metal particles into a patient's bloodstream over time. Lawsuits over the ASR implant have piled up across the country, accusing DePuy of manufacturing a defective product, failing to warn patients and doctors of problems with the implant and negligence in designing, manufacturing and selling the product. DePuy, which introduced the ASR in the U.S. in 2005 after winning 510(k) clearance from the Food & Drug Administration, allegedly knew of design problems with the cup but failed to adequately warn physicians, according to the lawsuits.