Hits & Misses – 2009/3/9
37 percent of doctors… complained that patients routinely demanded unnecessary prescriptions. By some estimates, unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions add $2 billion a year to health care costs.
Here's how it's done. In the in vitro lab, doctors screen the embryos for the desired traits – say blonde hair and/or blue eyes – as well as the desired sex. They implant the selected embryo in the womb and discard all the rest.
TV: No harm, no help for babies.
The study of 872 children found no correlation between the amount of time they had spent viewing television before they reached 2 years of age and their progress at age 3.
We previously reported here that researchers have sequenced all 99 strains of the human rhinovirus. Here's more:
For every cold we know of, virologists say, we fight off three or four with no symptoms… [But when they appear], there's no evidence that treating symptoms affects recovery time. It takes from five to 10 days, no matter what you do.
On designer babies, apparently IQ and atheletic prowess are too complicated to engineer. But I suppose that’s coming as well.
I thought you told us in an earlier post that chicken soup helps.
On the pills, this sheds a completly new light on all those articles we have been seeing about how people are cutting back on care (especially drug purchases) because of financial difficulties.