Giant Food stores will give free generic antibiotics to customers with a prescription for the next three months in what retail experts called an aggressive move in supermarkets' heated battle for shoppers. The company said the program, which will begin Friday and last through March 21, covers several popular antibiotics.
American medicine is already in a crisis mode when it comes to geriatric care, and the problem will only become worse unless new approaches are found, experts say. For starters, there has been a huge decrease in the number of practicing geriatricians, and only 300 new ones are trained each year. That, despite the fact that the number of people over the age of 65 will double in the next 20 years.
California's failure to check the criminal backgrounds of health professionals extends well beyond nurses, encompassing tens of thousands of doctors, dentists, psychiatric technicians and therapists. The Los Angeles Times reported this fall that regulators had not vetted about 195,000 of the state's registered and vocational nurses, exposing patients to caregivers with histories of violence, addiction, predatory behavior or corruption. Prompted by those articles, the state Department of Consumer Affairs has identified 104,000 more professionals from all levels of medical care to add to that tally. All told, the agency now estimates that close to a third of the state's 937,100 licensed healthcare workers have not been screened through fingerprint checks.
Experts say that most drugs, whatever the disease, work for only about half the people who take them. Not only is much of the nation's approximately $300 billion annual drug spending wasted, but countless patients are being exposed unnecessarily to side effects. No wonder so much hope is riding on the promise of "personalized medicine," in which genetic screening and other tests give doctors more evidence for tailoring treatments to patients, potentially improving care and saving money.
Middlesex (CT) Hospital's new $31 million emergency department, which opened in March, has settled into a groove. The waiting room is usually empty and people are seeing doctors in a third of the time, even though the patient caseload has risen 4% since March—in what has been one of the busiest emergency centers in the state. Memories of a crowded waiting room and patients on gurneys in the hallway are fading. The largest renovation project in the history of the hospital increased the number of emergency beds from 26 to 44 and added new technology that has streamlined patient care.
Obesity surgery can reverse diabetes in teens, just as it does in adults, according to a small study. All but one of the 11 extremely obese teens studied saw their diabetes disappear within a year after weight-loss surgery, the researchers reported. The 11th patient still had diabetes, but needed much less insulin and stopped taking diabetes pills. Previous studies have shown the diabetes benefits of obesity surgery for adults.