New numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the flu epidemic is winding down, but the illness is still widespread in some northeastern states. The CDC reports that Tennessee is only seeing "local" level outbreaks. Infection Control Director Darci Hodge from East Tennessee Children's Hospital said they are seeing a few cases of the flu a week, but it's nothing they would consider a "resurgence." At the University of Tennessee Medical Center, however, it is a different story. New data released Monday shows the flu has declined in recent weeks, but the number of cases compared to last season has increased.
Sharpening a medical debate about the costs and benefits of cancer screening, a new report estimates that the U.S. spends $4 billion a year on unnecessary medical costs due to mammograms that generate false alarms, and on treatment of certain breast tumors unlikely to cause problems. The study published Monday in the journal Health Affairs breaks the cost down as follows: $2.8 billion resulting from false-positive mammograms and another $1.2 billion attributed to breast cancer overdiagnosis. That's the treatment of tumors that grow slowly or not at all, and are unlikely to develop into life-threatening disease during a woman's lifetime.
It's a warm afternoon in Miami, and 35-year-old Emanuel Vega has come to Baptist Health Primary Care for a physical exam. Dr. Mark Caruso shakes his hand with a welcoming smile. Vega, a strapping man with a thick black beard, is feeling good, but he came to see the doctor today because his wife thought he should ? she even made the appointment. It is free to him under his insurance policy with no co-pay, as most preventive care is under the Affordable Care Act. Vega is one of more than 44 million Americans who is taking part in a medical ritual: visiting the doctor for an annual physical exam. But there's little evidence that those visits actually do any good for healthy adults.
Forget pizza and Amazon products—the Mayo Clinic wants to use drones to supply hospitals with precious medical supplies like blood. "Blood is unique because it's expensive and expires—platelets and thawed plasma last just five days—and the supply is very limited," said Cornelius A. Thiels, D.O., a general surgery resident at Mayo Clinic's campus in Rochester, Minnesota in the statement. "In our region, the smallest critical access hospitals stock just two to six units of red cells and no fresh frozen plasma or platelets." In many areas, smaller hospitals are dependent on larger hospitals and blood banks to supply them with blood.
What is pure medicine? It is the ideal medicine we envisioned practicing when entering medical school before acronyms like CMS, LCD, and MUE clouded the view. Pure medicine operates outside the confines of insurance restrictions and complexities. Its core is high quality care using the best tools and techniques at our disposal to help patients become the best version of themselves.
More than 750 plaintiffs sued the Johns Hopkins Hospital System on Wednesday over medical experiments in Guatemala in the 1940s and 1950s during which subjects were infected with venereal diseases. The lawsuit in Baltimore seeks $1 billion for individuals, spouses and children of people infected with syphilis, gonorrhea and other sexually transmitted diseases through a United States government program. The suit claims Johns Hopkins officials had "substantial influence" over the studies, controlling some advisory panels, and were involved in planning and authorizing experiments. A Hopkins lawyer called the suit, the latest over the studies, baseless. A federal judge in 2012 dismissed a lawsuit against the government over the same study.