“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.
More
The hype around 3D mammograms misleads patients about the benefits of cancer screening.
More
How often do care cascades happen, and what harms do they cause?
More
Even though proven interventions exist to reduce waste on the clinical side, implementing them on a large scale is easier said than done...
More
Over the past several decades, the medical community has made many positive advances in cancer prevention and treatment, leading to reduced deaths from cancer. However, for some types of cancer, we have not improved mortality rates despite pouring billions of dollars into early detection efforts. Which types of cancers are we preventing, which types are […]
More
The Lown Institute organized the first conference in the world dedicated to the problem of overtreatment. The Institute has since convened six national conferences attracting more than 200 attendees annually and featuring world-renowned leaders in health care.
More
Testing asymptomatic adults for urinary tract infections often leads to overdiagnosis and overtreatment. So why do doctors keep doing it?
More
This oncologist is taking a "Lownian" approach to treating advanced cancer.
More
How do we frame overuse not just as an issue of cost but also as an issue of harm? A recap of the Lown Institute meeting on overuse harms research.
More
The latest edition in the Lown Right Care Series in American Family Physician offers tips for providing right care to adults with dementia.
More
Which studies on overuse in 2018 were the most influential?
More
A recent study finds that overtreatment of older adults for Type 2 diabetes is common, harmful, and preventable.
More
It's Grandparent's Day -- Do you know what medications your grandparents are taking?
More
If you buy something you don't need at a high discount, does that make it a good deal? Why patients should be wary of Groupons for medical imaging.
More
Does the supply of NICU beds correspond to the need for intensive care? Or are some infants being placed in the NICU when less intensive care would be safer?
More
On the Institute for Healthcare Improvement blog, Dr. Terry Fulmer, President of The John A. Hartford Foundation, explains why tackling medication overload is essential for older adults.
More
Medication overload (also known as polypharmacy) is a serious problem among older adults. It’s getting new attention as efforts to make health care more “age-friendly” spread around the US.
More
Oklahoma Proton Center is completing upgrades to software and equipment as it anticipates treating its 3,000th cancer patient this fall.
However, not everyone within the medical community is sold on proton therapy, which has not been widely proven to be more successful than standard radiation that is much cheaper.
“It’s controversial because it’s incredibly expensive, and there isn’t any evidence that it actually works for many of the ways it’s being used,” Shannon Brownlee, senior vice president at the Lown Institute, a Brookline-based health care think tank, told the Boston Globe this year.
More
