This is from a Ron Bailey (Reason) review of a new study:
According to [Columbia University economist Frank Lichtenberg], life expectancy increased faster in states that more rapidly adopted advanced diagnostic imaging techniques, were quicker to use new drugs, and attracted an increasing proportion of doctors from top medical schools.
Continue reading Study: New Technologies, New Drugs Save Lives and Pay Their Own Way
MRIs really are magnetic. Knives, scissors and other metal objects go flying.
Ten unhealthiest sandwiches in America.
This is from today's Wall Street Journal:
In Ontario, Lindsay McCreith was suffering from headaches and seizures yet faced a four and a half month wait for an MRI scan in January of 2006. Deciding that the wait was untenable, Mr. McCreith did what a lot of Canadians do: He went south, and paid for an MRI scan across the border in Buffalo. The MRI revealed a malignant brain tumor.
It gets worse. And there are more horror stories. Must reading for everyone who thinks Canada provides universal care. In fact, the victims are taking their case to court. The goal:
To win Canadians the freedom to spend their own money to protect themselves from the inadequacies of the government health-insurance system.
In December 2008, a PC used to check digital images rebooted in an operating theatre in mid-surgery at the Sheffield Teaching Hospitals Trust in England. After managers decided to disable automatic security updates to solve the problem, hospital computers were promptly infected with the Conficker worm. [link, link, and link]
The hospital system tried to keep the problem secret, warning staff not to make details of the outbreak public. When that failed, the trust said that the worm infection had not cost the public any money, "just time and effort by the IT teams." Clean-up continues. Continue reading Health IT: What Can Go Wrong
A November 2008 study by the Massachusetts Medical Society found that 83% of its doctors practice defensive medicine at a cost of at least $1.4 billion a year. Here's a chart:
This is from an op-ed in the New York Times.
Each subject lay in the scanner for about an hour while we projected on a small screen a series of cigarette package labels from various countries – including statements like "smoking kills" and "smoking causes fatal lung cancers." We found that the warnings prompted no blood flow to the amygdala, the part of the brain that registers alarm, or to the part of the cortex that would be involved in any effort to register disapproval.
To the contrary, the warning labels backfired: they stimulated the nucleus accumbens, sometimes called the "craving spot," which lights up on f.M.R.I. whenever a person craves something, whether it's alcohol, drugs, tobacco or gambling.
Most of us comparison shop when we need a new appliance, computer or car. But for the first time, I've tumbled into the new experience of comparison shopping to find the best deal on the cost of my medical care. I have been utterly shocked by what I've discovered so far.
This is from a Gina Kolata piece in The New York Times:
Magnetic resonance machines….vary enormously, and not just in the strength of their magnets. Even more important, radiologists say, is the quality of the imaging coils they put around the body part being scanned and the computer programs they use to control the imaging and to analyze the images. And there is a huge variability in skill among the technicians doing the scans…. Then there is the question of how skilled is the radiologist who reads your scans.