Health junction

Choosing Medical Treatments Wisely The spate of media articles on unnecessary procedures and treatments which do not improve health and can harm patients is a sentinel cry to the public. This article addresses the types of questions patients and their families need to ask when faced with health care decisions and where to get answers. Understand the Disease Evidence One of the statistical principles which patients should understand is that an increase in the incidence (precursor) of a disease does not mean an increase in the invasiveness or death from the disease. A good example of this is thyroid cancer, here-to-for a relatively obscure disease which has now hurtled into 9 th place in the cancer lexicon, as elucidated by Dr. R. Michael Tuttle in Medscape Oncology. [1] What this phenomena means to the general public as well as clinicians is the surveillance and testing for this condition has increased in specificity and volume. This does not in fact mean that there are more invasive t...

Recently, both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times have published articles about oncologists' new consumer tool to gauge the effectiveness of cancer drugs. This effort was spurred after harsh rebukes of the pharmaceutical industry from clinicians at the Mayo Clinic and Harvard Medical School.  Both of the "Times" articles cite information from the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) article, which ranked cancer fighting drugs from 2009 through 2013 for effectiveness and cost. (1) Oncologists have embraced this new consumer decision aide as it provides health care purchasers and their families with another basis for decision making. And, as it often turns out, the most expensive medication is not necessarily the most effective. Using a scale of 0 to 130 rating system, the cancer drug treatments are ranked for efficacy. Here are the most expensive oncology medications, based on the analysis of experts at JAMA in this study, costs are expressed annual...

Hospital Safety In Light of the Ebola Scare Due to public hysteria and resulting quarantine for Ebola patients, family members, and anyone who may have come in contact with any of these unfortunate individuals, this is a good time for consumers to re-acquaint themselves with patient safety standards through publicly available sources. First a primer on the main causes of adverse patient safety events in hospitals in the United States. In patient safety lexicon when something goes wrong in health care treatment while in a hospital setting, this is referred to as an adverse event. There are a number of health care organizations within the nation that track patient safety information including: the Centers for Disease Control, Joint Commission for Hospital Accreditation, the National Quality Forum and several nonprofit entities. Of the nonprofit leaders, The Leapfrog Group� is known for its annual hospital quality and patient safety survey, of which over 5,000 hospitals participate. In a...