The question of headlines on all Wall Street Journal #health debates #boston

Do we need to wonder why we saw a string of WSJ tweets come in this morning as questions? Didn’t our search engine optimizers tell us to do the same thing? Wouldn’t have be kind of annoying?

Are there any Boston doctors in the long list of posts debating the “Big Issues“? Should we link to them?

Is John Collins,  chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Mass correct when he argues all patients should have unique health-care identification number?

Don Berwick support ACOs? Didn’t  Donald M. Berwick, the  Harvard prof who briefly ran  Centers for Medicare

Is it any surprise that Joeseph Kvedar, director of the Center for Connected Health in Boston urges doctors and patients to communicate via email?

Books by doctors on health reform and beyond

As a freelancer, I’ve been known to grumble about doctors who write. After all, why should they hog the Pulitzers and the pages of The New Yorker when they have perfectly good day jobs? On the other hand, doctors in print often offer us an alternative to the mass-marketed Dr. Oz or the perky, laminated docs on daytime TV’s “The Doctors.”

So put down that Parade magazine. (We’ll admit that  Dr. O has some good advice about sleeping problems.) Instead, check out the always rich “Ideas” section of The Boston Globe, where you’ll find a column by MGH doc Suzanne Koven on doctors who write.

Perhaps so many doctors are writing literature today as an antidote to our increasingly rushed and technological medical practice. There’s less time or incentive to include, in the modern case history, vivid descriptions of a patient’s appearance, details about his occupation and family life, or musings about what might ail him, than there were 100 years ago. When Oliver Sacks showed his friend, W.H. Auden, film clips of the stiff and mute patients about whom he wrote in “Awakenings,’’ he asked the poet “What do you think they lack?’’ “Music,’’ Auden replied. Doctors who write literature supply the grace notes missing from today’s medical records, recapturing the music of the human condition.

Maybe.  The column arrives in anticipation of the release of an anthology “Writer, M.D.: The Best Contemporary Fiction and Nonfiction by Doctors,’’ edited by Leah Kaminsky . And the story includes a list of other works by doctor-writers.

Writing about patients can generate compelling narratives.  Try pitching a story on health reform.  So, we are surprised to see that you need to buy a ticket for the Cambridge reading Jonathan Gruber’s Health Care Reform: What It Is, Why It’s Necessary, and How It Works. Maybe we should learn to draw: it’s a comic book.

 

For a more text-based, deeply informed view of politics and health reform, check out the free discussion by Stuart Altman and David Shactman of  “Power, Politics, and Universal Health Care’’ on Monday  at 7 p.m. at Brookline Booksmith. Altman, a Brandeis professor, has been bouncing back and forth between Waltham and Washington for years. He knows his stuff.

 

 

Hold the fried chicken: RedSox workout tips from the Globe

Some of the BoSox players were lifting chicken legs instead of weights last spring, but not Ellsbury and Pedroia.  Jacoby returned from an injury for a great year and Dustin was solid all season.

The Globe’s Daily Dose offers some advice from their off-season trainers, who counsel them “on the importance of sleep, self-massage to relieve soreness, and what they need to eat to help build muscle.”

Also, please note this week’s publication of the Health Wonk Review, the biweekly digest of the best of health policy blog. This edition includes links to posts about the upcoming Supreme Court decision on insurance mandates, HIT and primary care and the new Independent Payment Advisory Board. Also note the previous edition, brought to you by Center for Objective Health Policy, a site that encourages “individuals to apply free-market ideas to healthcare.”

New fitness and exercise blog on the Globe web site

The Globe has added another health blog — this one on fitness:

Elizabeth Comeau is the senior health & wellness producer at Boston.com. She will be blogging about her personal fitness journey and using a device called a FitBit to track her weekly goals and progress (see below). Follow her journey and share your own. Read more about Elizabeth and this blog.  

Bring on the user-generated content. Pairs up nicely with CommonHealth’s “Why to Exercises Today” series.

We’ve added it as a link, along with another for  WBUR’s Healthcare Savvy:

What is Healthcare Savvy?

We are a community of patients who are starting to shop for health care based on quality and cost.        Have you thought about whether you are getting the best care for the best price?        Share your experiences. Read about ours. Post a tip or a resource. Ask questions! Browse at your leisure. Join anytime by registering.

Will competition in Hep C drug market bring down costs? #hepatitis

Lots of health news emerges from investor events like this week’s J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. The Globe’s Robert Weisman reports this morning on competition for Cambridge-based (soon to be Boston-based) Vertex Pharmaceuticals.

SAN FRANCISCO – It was supposed to be a victory lap for Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. executives: their first appearance at the life sciences industry’s most important annual conclave since the Cambridge biotechnology company won long-sought approval of its potential blockbuster drug to treat hepatitis C.

But the Vertex team, including the departing chief executive and his newly appointed successor, was partly upstaged by an announcement on the eve of the 30th annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference that the giant drug maker Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. was entering the hepatitis C market.

Bristol-Myers said it will spend $2.5 billion to buy Inhibitex Inc., which is developing a next-generation hepatitis C treatment that will compete with two being developed by Vertex.

As he notes, the company’s stock price has dropped from $58.87 in May to $35.68 yesterday.

Will competition also bring the price of Telaprevir down?  The Globe reports that the drug will cost between $30,000 and $50,000 per treatment.

In the meantime, the company is building a new waterfron tower.The Globe also reports that the new headquarters will cost $2 billion. Boston will kick in a $11.8 million tax break, for the company, which is now located in Cambridge.

MIT science news tracker accuses NY Times of “trashing” yoga #altmed #yoga

More discontent about reporting on alternative approaches to wellness.

Paul Raeburn – who discloses that he’s been practicing yoga for a dcade — writes:

The magazine excerpt notes, in the setup near the top, that “Among devotees, from gurus to acolytes forever carrying their rolled-up mats, yoga is described as a nearly miraculous agent of renewal and healing.” That makes the criticism easy. It’s much easier to argue that yoga is not nearly miraculous than to discuss the risks and rewards, which would likely have resulted in a more accurate story.

We then hear about a yoga student who had trouble walking after remaining in a particular yoga position “for hours a day.” Well, sitting in an office chair for hours a day has adverse health consequences, too. Is Broad demolishing yoga on the basis of the experiences of a fanatic?…

You make the call. From the Times:

After class, I asked (instructor Glenn)  Black about his approach to teaching yoga — the emphasis on holding only a few simple poses, the absence of common inversions like headstands and shoulder stands. He gave me the kind of answer you’d expect from any yoga teacher: that awareness is more important than rushing through a series of postures just to say you’d done them. But then he said something more radical. Black has come to believe that “the vast majority of people” should give up yoga altogether. It’s simply too likely to cause harm.       

Not just students but celebrated teachers too, Black said, injure themselves in droves because most have underlying physical weaknesses or problems that make serious injury all but inevitable. Instead of doing yoga, “they need to be doing a specific range of motions for articulation, for organ condition,” he said, to strengthen weak parts of the body. “Yoga is for people in good physical condition. Or it can be used therapeutically. It’s controversial to say, but it really shouldn’t be used for a general class.”

New Yorker: Former NEJM editor dismisses placebo claims

Arnold Relman writes in this week’s New Yorker.  He argues that researchers claiming placebos can cure are driven by ”substantial financial support for their anti-establishment views”  from NIH and private donors. From the letter’s page:

There is simply no evidence that physical diseases, such as cancer,  atherosclerosis, or organ disorders, can be cured or measurably improved by  placebos. Experienced physicians know that sympathetic concern and reassurance  can often allay subjective symptoms—at least temporarily—but only appropriate  medical treatment has a chance of curing physical disease. I suspect that the  main reason advocates of “alternative medicine” like Kaptchuk are receiving such  a friendly reception in many leading medical schools these days is that there is  substantial financial support for their anti-establishment views from one part  of the National Institutes of Health and from a few very wealthy private donors.

Harvard video: The Supercommittee Collapse and America’s Healthcare Future

Harvard School of Public Health Panel

NYTimes starts its TBI / PTSD series in Maine

DEXTER, Me. — The roadside bomb that separated Sgt. Matthew Pennington from his left leg in 2006 also shattered his right leg and scorched his lungs. Those injuries he understood. But then came the ones he did not, the ones inside his head…

Like Mr. Pennington, many veterans injured in combat are finding that their invisible psychological and neurological wounds are proving more debilitating than their obvious physical ones.

About 1,700 American service members have lost limbs in Iraq and Afghanistan, most in roadside bombings that seared skin, shattered bones and damaged internal organs as well. Most of those troops also came home with traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder, which in many cases were not recognized for months.

Click here for the National Center for PTSD .

Story from The Nation on the misdiagnosis of head injuries. Cites Harvard study.

Here for Operation Recovery:

Service members who experience PTSD, TBI, MST, and combat stress have the right to exit the traumatic situation and receive immediate support, and compensation. Too often, service members are forced to redeploy back into dangerous combat, or train in situations that re-traumatize them. 

Rounding up the year’s health news

Theirs and ours:

You can read Commonhealth’s list or listen to it on Radio Boston:

Or listen to Carey Goldberg on WBUR

MassDevice offers : The top medical device stories of the year, Part I

From sweeping regulatory changes promised, but never delivered, by the FDA, to the industry and regulatory backlash against the impending 2.3% excise tax, the industry didn’t move the chains too far in the past twelve months.

The Globe offers Top Ten Health Apps and health advice from “prominant Bostonians.” The list includes dog walking, hoops to stave off Alzheimer’s,  meditation, all things in moderation, no desserts  –this did not come from the restaurateur –and volunteerism –this did come from a museum director.