Lisa Iezzoni, a professor of medicine at Harvard, wanted to understand why people with disabilities kept reporting receiving substandard care. “I thought I needed to start talking to doctors,” she said.
THE WALRUS (CANADA) – I CAN’T RECALL a time as a paramedic when I pronounced someone dead without complete confidence.
Back then, it was a relatively easy decision to make. The Ministry of Health in Ontario, where I served on ambulances and helicopters for a decade, had a list of things that qualified someone as being “obviously dead.”
It’s the type of list paramedic trainees have to recite for exams, and I knew it colloquially as...
Northwestern University – If health care facilities such as hospitals and nursing homes don't follow patient safety rules set by The Joint Commission (TJC)—the independent organization responsible for accrediting health care facilities—they may lose their accreditation, and consequently, lose patients and millions of dollars every year in funding.
But what if those rules aren't supported by evidence?
A new Northwestern Medicine study found of the new rules issued during a one-year period by the TJC, many...
The Affordable Care Act was supposed to make preventive health care such as mammograms and colonoscopies free of charge to patients without cost sharing ...
KAISER HEALTH NEWS – Elizabeth Melville and her husband are gradually hiking all 48 mountain peaks that top 4,000 feet in New Hampshire.
“I want to do everything I can to stay healthy so that I can be skiing and hiking into my 80s — hopefully even 90s!” said the 59-year-old...
Views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill.
THE HILL – American hospitals are reportedly looking to increase their prices by up to 15 percent, in line with historical trends that have seen them raise rates by roughly double the prevailing inflation rate.
Hospital prices are already outrageous, regularly throwing patients into bankruptcy and financial ruin.
Significantly increasing hospitals’ prices and negotiated rates will further burden healthcare consumers — including patients,...
MEDICAL EXPRESS – According to new research from Boston Medical Center and Stanford University School of Medicine, almost a quarter of physicians who responded to a survey at Stanford Medicine experienced workplace mistreatment, with patients and visitors being the most common source.
The research, published in JAMA Network Open, found mistreatment was common among all physicians, but there were disparities in mistreatment by gender and race.
Women were twice more likely to report mistreatment than men....
AP – Researchers trying to learn what killed the first person to receive a heart transplant from a pig have discovered the organ harbored an animal virus but cannot yet say if it played any role in the man’s death.
A Maryland man, 57-year-old David Bennett Sr., died in March, two months after the groundbreaking experimental transplant. University of Maryland doctors said Thursday they found an unwelcome surprise — viral DNA inside the pig heart....
PLUS: Black Vaccine Hesitancy Rooted in Mistrust, Doubts
CONTX – Court documents unsealed during the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) talcum powder litigation reveal that the company funded a 1971 study in which Pennsylvania prisoners, most of them African American, were “injected subcutaneously with asbestos.”
Knowledge of the experiments has been public for some time, but J&J’s involvement has only just been recognised, according to Bloomberg.
This news comes after unsealed documents were released in recent J&J lawsuits,...
INSIDER – Heidi Richard, a 47-year-old elementary school teacher in Worcester, Massachusetts, is a lifelong runner who'd always been healthy.
So she knew something was wrong in spring 2019 when she started experiencing severe stomach pains, vomiting, and night sweats.
At the doctor, though, she was told her symptoms were just stress or anxiety. She was given an antacid and sent on her way, she wrote for Today.com.
Richard's pain and vomiting didn't subside, and she unintentionally...
According to these experts, Chinese authorities murder some prisoners in “reeducation camps” to harvest their organs and sell them for transplant for high prices to local and foreign customers.
KAISER HEALTH NEWS – Korra Elliott has tried to avoid seeing a doctor while waiting to get on Medicaid. She worries she can’t afford more bills without any insurance coverage.
But in early March — five months, she said, after applying and with still no decision about her application — a suspected case of the flu sent her blood pressure soaring and landed her in the emergency room.
The 28-year-old mother of four from Salem, Missouri,...
A new study has found that patients exposed to the flu at their primary care physician’s office were 31.8% more likely than unexposed patients to revisit with the flu within two weeks.
KAISER HEALTH NEWS – Earlier this year, the World Health Organization announced a global campaign to combat ageism — discrimination against older adults that is pervasive and harmful but often unrecognized.
“We must change the narrative around age and ageing” and “adopt strategies to counter” ageist attitudes and behaviors, WHO concluded in a major report accompanying the campaign.
Several strategies WHO endorsed — educating people about ageism, fostering intergenerational contacts, and changing policies and laws to...
New Hampshire Union Leader – More and sicker patients, fewer people to care for them and a highly contagious virus that makes everything less predictable: This is the “new normal” in New Hampshire hospitals.
The delta wave of COVID-19 may be waning, but hospital leaders expect the virus to be here for a long time.
The virus complicates underlying problems — an aging population that needs more health care, people delaying needed treatment because of...