This is not the story of my leukemia diagnosis, nor of my subsequent stem cell transplant. Those are harrowing stories that make excellent Facebook click bait: “A mother of three!” “A doctor herself!” “Diagnosed at Christmas!”
It is more mundane than that.
It is the story of being chronically ill, while working among the well. It is the story of being diseased while wearing the healer’s white coat. It is, most painfully, being fully human among those who know human bodies most intimately.
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Apps like Flo and Clue are shifting from just tracking your health data to using it to make evaluations about your health risks. Their tools may not always be accurate.
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“Sepsis kills over 52 000 every year—each death a preventable tragedy”, tweeted Matt Hancock, UK Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, in March, 2019. Many other non-contextualised or fictitious claims regularly fill media pages and airwaves, creating a distorted picture of sepsis epidemiology and unrealistic expectations of outcomes. This hype has generated an unhealthy climate of fear and retribution in both the UK and the USA. Patients and families fear the so-called hidden killer and their confidence in health-care providers is undermined. Hospitals are criticised, penalised, and litigated against for failing to give patients antibiotics within 1 h of presumptive diagnosis. Doctors are reported for not giving antibiotics to patients they deem non-infected. It is thus worth summarising available data and providing a more balanced perspective. Without belittling the problem, patient care must be informed by facts.
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With help from a network of industry-independent experts, doctors are speaking out against conflicts of interest in maternal safety recommendations
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When healthcare systems and not-for-profit social service providers step up to provide food, housing and transportation assistance to needy patients, they often discover government cutbacks undermine their efforts. The U.S. spends less than other advanced industrial nations on social services—about 4% of gross domestic product. The average among other rich countries is around 10%.
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The hype around 3D mammograms misleads patients about the benefits of cancer screening.
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To the growing list of gender-based disparities faced by women in academic medicine, we can add 1 more: on average, across thousands of medical journals, women with comparable credentials and experience are less likely than men to author invited commentary articles (ie, editorials). Smaller studies, limited to specific disciplines, suggested this was the case but did not account for factors that are likely to be associated with invitations to write editorials, such as publication history. Thomas and colleagues reported on their examination of 72 038 medical journal commentary articles published from 2013 to 2017. The researchers used validated methods to infer author gender and matched commentary authors to controls on characteristics likely to be associated with invitations, including field of expertise, seniority, number of publications, and citation record. Adjustment for these confounders attenuated but did not eliminate the substantial differences in favor of men. Surprisingly, the magnitude of the disadvantage was larger for senior women. Overall, the odds of authoring an editorial were 21% lower for women compared with men. However, for the most senior women, the odds of authoring an editorial were 31% lower than for men with comparable credentials.
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Doctors are criticizing a recent recommendation from medical experts to give blood-thinning drugs to nearly all women who give birth by caesarean section, saying the advice may be unsafe and tainted by potential conflicts of interest.
“This is basically an experiment being done on new moms,” said Adam Urato, chief of maternal fetal medicine at MetroWest Medical Center in Framingham, Mass., said in an interview.
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It's a Lown Institute tradition to highlight pharma's fear-mongering on Halloween, and this year is no exception.
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Imagine a health-care system in which doctors and nurses are so exhausted and beaten down that many of them work like zombies — error-prone, apathetic toward patients and at times trying to blunt their own pain with alcohol or even suicide attempts. That is what America’s broken health care system is doing to its health workers, according to a 312-page report released Wednesday by the National Academy of Medicine, one of the country’s most prestigious medical institutions.
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Eight years ago, a study published in Science found that black researchers were 10 percentage points less likely than white ones to receive funding from the National Institutes of Health, even after controlling for factors like educational background, previous research awards and publication record. Its authors theorized that the difference might reflect an accumulation of slight advantages over the course of white scientists’ careers. That study, which the N.I.H. itself commissioned, prompted the agency to put $500 million toward a 10-year initiative to improve the situation, for example by increased mentoring of minority researchers and efforts to address possible bias in peer review. But new research suggests racial disparity in grant funding persists, and offers a fresh theory about a source of some of it: research topic choice.
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Americans are losing trust in their doctors, says Dr. Marty Makary in his new book, The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care — and How to Fix It. The reason, he argues, is that medical care is just too expensive.
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Dr. Bernard Lown (1921-2021) was a pioneering cardiologist, humanitarian, and founder of the Lown Institute. From his invention of the modern direct current defibrillator to his advocacy of anti-nuclear proliferation, Dr. Lown saved countless lives and changed medicine forever. Learn more about Bernard Lown’s remarkable life in the timeline below!
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During a research career spanning more than 50 years, Dr. Bernard Lown’s achievements changed the practice of cardiology. He pioneered the development of the direct current defibrillator and contributed substantially to an understanding of the role of psychological factors in heart disease. Throughout his medical career, Dr. Lown emphasized the importance of listening to patients, […]
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Income volatility has a significant impact on financial security, which can affect heart health as well, according to new research.
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What a new study tells us about implementing shared decision making for older adults with multiple chronic conditions.
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