Three Trillion a Year How did American health care come to cost nearly three trillion dollars a year? One place to look is at procedures – diagnostic tests and therapeutic treatments. In terms of costs, “procedures” can be as simple as a red blood cell count or as complicated as a liver transplant. Hospitals, drug […]
What You Don’t Know (8/5/13)
Stumped We didn’t know what was causing his death. When we walked on to the medicine wards of the San Diego VA many years ago, most interns were pretty ignorant. Yet we believed someone else knew what to do. As in what was causing the large stock of misery before us. In VA medical wards […]
Little Bit by Little Bit (7/31/13)
Gradually… How do people get healthy? One little bit by little bit at a time. So it seems to work with exercise. Gretchen Reynolds did a nice short review in the July 9th, New York Times on studies of short versus “long” exercise. One group studied – young men from Beijing. Monitors looked at changes […]
“Evidence Based” Medicine? (7/22/13)
What’s the Evidence? Modern medicine’s recent mantra is to become “evidence based.” No more listening to anecdote. No more acceptance of poorly performed studies. Now we will look at “hard evidence” and properly designed trials to determine how to best treat human beings. And for evidence based medicine, death is a “hard” end point. These […]
Losing Everything (7/15/13)
Standing Out Maybe you knew him. He didn’t stand out in a crowd. A hardworking guy, in his mid-fifties, he long worked a steady job. Proudly he raised a family. Then the bust came. He got downsized. The losses came like dominos. First the job. Unemployment insurance went on for a while, but there was […]