By John Willinsky

What if you had access to all of the medical research in the world? Or better yet, what if the physician treating your particularly complex or rare condition had access to the latest research? Or what if a public health organization in your community could access that research to inform policymakers of measures to advance public health?

“Wait,” you may think, “can’t they already access that research? Doesn’t the Internet make that possible?” While unfortunately the answer to the first question is “No,” fortunately the Internet can make such access possible. As it is today, most physicians and public health professionals have very limited access to health research, almost all of which is published online. Only about a quarter of the research published today ends up being available to those working outside of universities, where libraries subscribe to a good proportion of the research journals.

So, what are these health professionals missing? What difference to their work would access to research make? Cheryl Holzmeyer, Lauren Maggio, Laura Moorhead and I seek to answer these questions with a new National Science Foundation study for which we are currently recruiting physicians and staff of public health NGOs.

We seek to demonstrate the difference it makes to the daily work of these health professionals to have easy electronic access to all the biomedical and public health research – or at least that large proportion held by Stanford University Library – for a period of eleven months (with one month of limited access as a control). To assess the impact of this access, we provide participants with a special portal to the research literature and track when and what research is viewed, while following up with interviews on the use and value of this access.

Continue reading “Could Opening Up the Doors to the World’s Medical Research Save Healthcare?”

By Richard Kaplan

The Sound Bite:

Increased longevity costs will bankrupt medicare.

Fact or Fiction?

This is partly fact, partly fiction. Medicare entitlement begins when a person ages in at 65, however just because beneficiaries are living longer does not necessarily mean higher Medicare costs.

The customary formulation of this myth is that Medicare is doomed by its own success in keeping its beneficiaries alive. Not only will the ranks of the program’s beneficiaries increase as the vaunted baby boom generation reaches the statutory age of eligibility, but because people are staying alive longer, Medicare’s costs will explode. The first part of this contention is indisputably true: entitlement to Medicare occurs when a person reaches age sixty-five, and the baby boom generation that is generally calibrated as starting in 1946 has arrived at that threshold. As a result, additional Medicare beneficiaries enter that program every day, and because the baby boom generation dwarfs any preceding age cohort, it is highly likely that more beneficiaries will be added to the program than are lost as older beneficiaries pass away. Consequently, the number of Medicare beneficiaries will inexorably increase over the next decade or so. Ceteris paribus, more beneficiaries mean higher aggregate costs.

The second part of the contention, however, is myth. Just because today’s Medicare beneficiaries live longer than did their predecessors does not necessarily translate into higher costs for the Medicare program. The source of this apparently counterintuitive proposition is the panoply of programmatic limitations that Medicare imposes on its coverages, regarding the myth that Medicare pays for long-term care. More specifically, beneficiaries who live longer typically do incur higher cumulative health care costs over their post-sixty-five lifetimes, but many of those costs are not borne by the Medicare program. This phenomenon is well illustrated by the following graph from an important analysis that appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine:

FIGURE 1: Cumulative Health Care Expenditures From the Age of 65 Years Until Death, According to the Type of Health Service and the Age of Death

Continue reading “Fact Check:Will Increased Longevity Bring Down Medicare?”

By COLIN SON, MD

An uninsured Seattle man has put out an ad offering to trade his 2006 Mustang GT for brain surgery. He provides an image from a MRI of his brain even. The poster doesn’t describe what symptoms he attributes to his arachnoid cyst but the relationship between arachnoid cysts and late symptoms is often difficult to establish.

Arachnoid cysts have been associated with headaches, nausea, seizures, vertigo and even in anecdotal cases with psychiatric symptoms or the onset of dementia. But the relationship is often hard to establish. Up to a third of people with chronic headaches have some sort of abnormality on there MRI, including arachnoid cysts. Relating the findings and the symptoms is often difficult; sometimes you have a finding on an MRI or a CT scan but it is a red herring as far as the symptoms are concerned.

Arachnoid cysts are collections of cerebrospinal fluid trapped between the brain and spinal cord and the arachnoid membrane. They’re primarily a congenital entity but can be associated with trauma, infection or be iatrogenic following surgery. The vast majority of cysts are discovered incidentally and associated with no major symptoms. While even asymptomatic cysts can progress to cause symptoms and they can be associated with post traumatic, or even spontaneous, hemorrhage the risk of such is low enough that in small asymptomatic cysts it is often more than reasonable to do nothing.

I’m a little bit dubious of the poster as he relates that he’s been thinking of trying to get to the cyst himself. However, if it’s an honest post I think the poster really needs to sit down with a neurosurgeon in consultation and go over the above in detail and discuss the best course of action.

I suppose health insurance is coming in 2014.

Colin Son, MD is a neurosurgical resident in Texas. He blogs regularly at Residency Notes, where this post originally appeared.

By Matthew Wayt

Following the Obama administration’s announcement about the suspension of enrollment in a high-risk health insurance program known as the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan, a flurry of commentary began on what the move means for the Affordable Care Act.

Some observers said that the program’s underwhelming enrollment numbers and high costs foreshadow inevitable problems with the ACA’s health insurance exchanges, while others drew a clear division between a program intended to insure only those with pre-existing health conditions and state marketplaces designed to spread risk by insuring both those who are sick and those in good health.

Two months after the halted enrollment, the debate continues.

Closing the Pools

The high-risk pools were designed to help sick U.S. residents gain coverage ahead of January 2014, when the ACA’s ban on denying individuals coverage because of pre-existing conditions will take effect.

In early February, the administration announced several cost-saving reforms intended to prevent the $5 billion program from running out of money. However, on Feb. 15, HHS officials announced that enrollment in the high-risk pools would end because of rising costs and limited funding.

Continue reading “Is the Suspension of the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan a Preview of Obamacare’s Failure?”

By David Overton

I have two sons, both healthy happy boys, both brought into this world in very different ways.  I work in healthcare and like many readers of THCB, the business of healthcare is often viewed through the business lens.  When we become the healthcare consumer, and are knee deep in the conundrum that is our healthcare system, the perspective changes dramatically.

Ezra was born in a major medical center, under the supervison of state of the art OB/GYNs, with all of the greatest technology, and under the care of the best nurses.  My wife wanted a “natural birth”, so natural that I affectionately describe it as a “granola birth”.  We were active duty military at the time so our choices were limited.  She hired a birth doula, read Ina May’s “Guide to Childbirth”, chose to see a Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner for her wellness visits, and was adamant that she did not want an epidural.

As we approached 40 weeks the adventure began.  At 36 weeks she could no longer see the NP, she had to now see the OB/GYN.  The OB/GYN began to make reference to not allowing us to go past 40 weeks, it would “endanger the child”.  My wife began to feel very uncomfortable and that she was slowly losing control of the experience she wanted to have.  At the 40 week visit, the OB/GYN gave a very stern warning that an “induction was now necessary for the safety of the baby” regardless of there being no indication that Ezra’s wellbeing was compromised.  We resisted as much as possible (with the help of no beds in the maternity ward) but at 41 weeks and 2 days, doctors’ orders brought us into the hospital for an induction.

Continue reading “A Tale of Two Births”

By Akshat Rathi

In the past few years, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that Facebook is to the mind what sugar is to the body. Facebook feed is easy to digest. It has made it easy to consume small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. That’s why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of photos and status updates, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Sadly, we are still far away from beginning to recognise how toxic Facebook can be.

Facebook misleads. Take the following event (borrowed from a Facebook friend). A bloke you knew in high school, whom you’ve not met or spoken to in real life since you left high school, has got married. He posts pictures of his wedding taken by a snazzy professional photographer. The pictures gather hundreds of likes and comments. Your friends shower your high school mate with congratulations. There are discussions about the bride’s dress, the tasty food, the fancy hotel, but absolutely no one knows that the reason they are really getting married is because the bride is pregnant with your mate’s baby. Facebook leads us to walk around with the completely wrong idea about our friends’ lives. So holiday pictures are over-liked. Stressful outbursts go unshared. A new job is immediately updated. Being fired is never made note of. Your friends might subscribe to a lot of “Causes”. In real life they do nothing about those causes.

We are not rational enough to be exposed to Facebook. Watching a video of your mother in a dance club is going to change your attitude towards your parents, regardless of your real relationship with them. If you think you can compensate with the strength of your own inner contemplation, you are wrong. Bankers and investors – who have powerful incentives to keep you hooked so that Facebook can make a profit – have shown that they cannot. The only solution: cut yourself off from using Facebook entirely.

Continue reading “Facebook Is Bad For You – and Giving Up Using It Will Make You Happier”

By MICHAEL L. MILLENSON

The recent news that thousands of seniors with cancer are being denied treatment with expensive chemotherapy drugs as a result of sequestration-mandated budget cuts raises the question of whether other patients are being equally harmed, but less visibly.

A careful study of the impact of past federal budget cutting suggests a troubling answer. That study, in a National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper published in 2011 and revised last year, established an eerily direct link between slashing hospital reimbursement and whether Medicare patients with a heart attack live or die.

Using data from California hospitals, researchers Vivian Y. Wu of the University of California and Yu-Chu Shen of the Naval Postgraduate School examined mortality rates for heart attack patients following the Medicare payment cuts resulting from the Balanced Budget Act (BBA) of 1997. The impact of the BBA was not as sudden or clear as the current situation, where Medicare’s two percent across-the-board cut on April 1 instantly transformed some expensive chemotherapy drugs into money losers, but it was significant and long-lasting.

The researchers examined hospitals claims data for a three-year period before the BBA, a three-year period when the BBA first took effect and, finally, a six-year period after budget cuts had either permanently changed care or failed to do so. They also tried to adjust for the severity of illness of the heart attack patients – the condition is formally known as acute myocardial infarction (AMI) – and other factors.

In the end, the researchers were able to trace a clear path from Congressional budget decisions to the patient’s bedside. Payment reductions triggered by the BBA , Wu and Shen concluded, led to “worse Medicare AMI patient outcomes, and more importantly, that the adverse effect only became measurable several years after the policy took place.”

They even quantified the effect: every thousand dollars of Medicare revenue loss from the BBA translated to a six to eight percent increase in mortality rates from heart attack. Continue reading “Why Medicare Cuts Will Quietly Kill Seniors”

By Paul Smalera

The author in early 2010 and mid 2011

I’ve been thinking about how to write this story for a long time. Should it be a book? A blog? A self-help guide? Ever since I realized I’d lost 60 pounds over the course of a year and a half, I knew I wanted to find a way to talk about it, and maybe help others. This is my first public attempt.

A note about the rounding of my roundness: My peak weight, shortly after I began weighing myself in 2010, was 242 lbs. My lowest weight since I started weighing myself has been 183.2 lbs — right in line with where I should be, at 6’3″ tall. I’m sure that I weighed more than 242 lbs. at peak, but frankly, I don’t care that I don’t have the data to account for those last 1.2 lbs.

Adam Davidson’s New York Times Magazine story, “How Economics Can Help You Lose Weight,” helped organize my thinking about how to finally write this. In his story, Adam explains that the rigid protocol his doctor puts him through acts as a kind of economic incentive for him to stay on the diet. I’m highly skeptical that the special liquid meals he can only buy directly through his dietician will help him keep off the weight. I tried all sorts of diets in the many years that I was overweight and though I never tried the Adam’s solution, it doesn’t sound like a recipe for long term success. At least twice, I lost weight and then gained it all, and more, back. (Meta note: I feel terrible writing that. Adam, I wish you the best. Maybe something you read here will help you keep off the weight you have already lost, and congratulations on that difficult achievement.)

Now that I’ve managed to make weight loss sound simple, and sound smug about my success (I’ve stayed within the 183-192-pound range for more than two years now), what’s my big secret? It’s data. Just like I said in the headline, I keep a Google Doc spreadsheet in which I’ve religiously logged my weight every morning for the last three-plus years, starting on January 1, 2010, when I knew I had to do something about my borderline obesity.

Continue reading “The Data Diet: How I Lost 60 Pounds Using A Google Docs Spreadsheet”

By John Schumann, MD

As a proponent of responsible DIY medicine, I love the idea put forth by Alex Beam in a column he wrote exploring the idea of writing your own obituary.

[The cynics chime in: "That's where you'll wind up if you try to "do" medicine yourself."]

Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who died in February, had his obituary in the NY Times initially inked in 1996, more than a decade before he actually died.** Since he was a figure of historic importance, we can’t blame the paper for being well-prepared.

Folks interested in the do-it-yourself approach won’t likely need to go to such lengths to create their own obituaries. Columnist Beam gives a couple of great examples of folks that have made good on such efforts:

Continue reading “How to Write Your Own Obituary”

By J.D. Kleinke

WASHINGTON — While the news swells this week with sad and angry retrospectives on the war in Iraq, it is worth noting that the tremendous human costs of that war would have been much greater, were it not for breakthroughs in combat medicine deployed for the first time on a broad scale in Iraq.

4,486 American men and women were killed in the Iraq war. This represents approximately 14 percent of the 32,221 wounded in action — versus the 19 percent killed in Vietnam, or 27 percent killed in World War II. These statistics are cold comfort for those whose lives were derailed and families tormented in the process, and they are a clarion call to re-double all our efforts to help those who survived.

Continue reading “Combat Medicine’s ‘Golden Hour’”