Last month, in a wide-ranging speech announcing he wouldn't run for the office, Vice President Joe Biden said if he could have been any kind of president, he'd want to be the one who ended cancer. "The things that are just about to happen — we can make them real with an absolute national commitment to end cancer as we know it today," said Biden. His son had died of brain cancer months earlier. Since the war on cancer began during Richard Nixon's presidency nearly 45 years ago, it has often seemed as if things were about to happen.
Legislation advancing in Lansing aims to better inform family members who care for patients at home after they're discharged from the hospital. The legislation, which won Senate approval last week, would require hospitals to give each patient the opportunity to designate a lay caregiver. Hospitals would have to attempt to consult with designated caregivers, answer their questions and answers, and issue discharge plans describing patients' after-care assistance needs. AARP Michigan says family caregivers are the first line of defense against older Americans being forced from their homes and into nursing homes. Similar legislation has been enacted in 18 states.
Research has repeatedly shown that, as expected, the outcomes of surgery depend highly on the skill and experience of the surgeon and the hospital team. So when researchers were designing a large, multi-center study comparing the use of stents and medications in stroke patients, they established a rigorous credentialing process to ensure the results wouldn't be skewed by the skill levels of the doctors placing the stents at the various centers. But when researchers did a follow-up analysis to look at the differences between the hospitals that enrolled more or fewer patients, they found a surprising result. There was no difference in outcomes for patients who received stents between higher or lower volume centers.
In a study published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, Chen and three colleagues found that the majority of opioid painkillers aren't being prescribed by a small group of bad doctors. Rather, they discovered that a huge number of those drugs are coming from run-of-the-mill family doctors and general practitioners. In a time when opioid addiction has become an epidemic, these kinds of numbers could prove important for health care professionals to understand their role in the crisis. "You can't just blame a handful of pain doctors," said Chen. "All of us are part of this problem whether we want to admit it or not."
There is a lot humor associated with the phenomena known as "speed dating." That's when singles get together in one location and meet other singles for quickie interviews and then move on to others for brief chats. If along the way, a couple experiences good chemistry in one of those quick talks they take it to the next step and arrange a formal date. Health First recently experimented with the same concept, this time with physicians and patients, at "The Doctor is In" event at the Rockledge Country Club. Unofficially, it was called it "Speed Dating for Doctors" and it was successful enough that Health First is planning on more of them in 2016.