"Thursday is graduation day for the first class of the nation’s only tribally affiliated medical school, the Oklahoma State University College of Osteopathic Medicine at the Cherokee Nation. Started in 2020, it’s an effort to boost the numbers of both Indigenous physicians and doctors willing to treat patients in rural areas experiencing severe physician shortages."
"According to new statistics from the Association of American Medical Colleges, for the second year in a row, students graduating from U.S. medical schools were less likely to apply this year for residency positions in states with abortion bans and other significant abortion restrictions."
Camilla Cavendish is too cynical about the BMA & its handling of the doctors' strike.
But she's right on the button when she points out much of 'junior' Doctor disquiet is not about wages but about working conditions.
And this, local Trusts can do something about by offering subsidised meals, free parking & better rests facilities (as has been done in Milton Keynes).
As she concludes, if we want Doctors 'to take care of us, we need to look after them'
Psychology news robots distributing from dozens of sources: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
. Does HIPAA Even Exist for Large Corporations?
I don't care if anyone knows I just got a COVID vaccine. Most people
don't care.
However, CVS Pharmacy just sent me an after-visit report across
unencrypted Internet to my email address.
The form included such fields as:
-- My Full Name
-- DATE OF BIRTH!
-- My Full Home Address
-- Medication Administered
-- Date and Time of Appointment
-- Name of Pharmacist I saw
-- Name of Doctor at CVS overseeing it all
-- Name and Address of my Primary Care Doctor
Also:
-- All the answers to my screening questionnaire! including my yes/no
answers to multiple medical conditions such as heart problems,
immunocompromise, seizures & other brain problems, and pregnancy.
So many things wrong here. This is almost enough information for
identity theft (lacking only SSN). It gives away LOTS of my medical
information. If I had a Gmail email address, Google would now have all
this information. What if I was a pregnant female in the southern USA
where Attorney Generals are starting to track state of pregnancy for
later prosecution if women go out-of-state for abortions or have a
suspicious (to them) miscarriage?
*How does CVS get away with this when smaller medical offices have to
be so careful?
*
>2 decades ago, the shocking results of a major women’s #health study challenged the safety of menopause #hormone medication, & overnight, millions of #women & their #doctors abandoned the drugs….
Now, a long-term follow-up of the #WomensHealth Initiative (WHI)…found that for many younger menopausal women—under 60—the benefits…outweigh the risks for short-term treatment of symptoms, incl’g hot flashes & night sweats.
My new story for the Medical Post/Canadian Healthcare Network. #Doctors and #pharmacists in Canada can log on for free. Here are a few paragraphs.
Could a century old treatment be an answer to antibiotic resistance?
In a first in Canada, a patient with an #antibiotic resistant artificial joint infection has received treatment with phage therapy and is showing promising early responses.
“This is cutting edge stuff, and a potentially new technology,” said Dr. Marisa Azad, the infectious diseases physician who treated the patient. She is also an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Ottawa.
The patient presented with severe periprosthetic joint infection (PJI) in the summer of 2023. She had already undergone multiple surgeries and had experienced several relapses and infections with the same persistent bacteria.
“She’d been on multiple very prolonged courses of antibiotics and had a severe drug allergy to two major drug classes of antibiotics. I was extremely limited in what I could use to treat her,” Dr. Azad told the Medical Post in an interview.
That’s when the idea arose of trying an experimental treatment course with phage therapy. The team got approval for doing the experimental treatment from Health Canada, and worked with Winnipeg-based Cytophage, which supplied the phages.
“We developed a protocol and gave her therapy over two weeks while she was admitted to hospital. She’s completed her therapy. Now we’re monitoring her closely and giving her adjunctive antibiotics,” she said.
The idea didn’t come out of the blue. In the medical literature, a study from just last year in Clinical #Infectious Diseases provided a review of 33 previously published cases of patients with end-stage, refractory bone and joint infections (BJI) who underwent treatment with phage therapy. The authors found that from those case reports, “29 (87%) achieved microbiological or clinical success, two (5.9%) relapsed with the same organisms, and two (5.9%) with a different organism” with no serious adverse events.
The conclusions of that paper stated there were “important advantages, disadvantages, and barriers to the implementation of phage therapy for BJIs.” Yet, at the same time, the authors added they, “believe that if phage therapy were to be used earlier in the clinical course, fewer cumulative antibiotics may be needed in an individual treatment course.”
The word phage is short for #bacteriophage, a word coined in 1917—literally meaning bacteria-eater. They are viruses whose lifecycle depends on certain types of bacteria.
“They latch on to specific types of bacteria and inject their genetic material into the bacterial cell." Dr. Azad explained. "They take over the bacterial cells’ machinery to produce more little viruses inside and explode or burst open the bacteria,” releasing viral particles that can go and infect other cells of the same type of bacteria.
Intriguingly, each #phage targets a specific type of #bacteria...
The story of phages started over 100 years ago. They were independently discovered, first in 1915 by a British pathologist, Frederick Twort, and then again in 1917 by French-Canadian microbiologist Felix d’Herelle. And...
In #Texas, #doctors face a real #SophiesChoice. They can either practice #medicine the way they’ve been taught, regardless of the personal consequences to themselves; they can try their best to comply with the arbitrary edicts of the #Republican state legislature and their own hapless medical board, and still risk #prison; or they can choose to leave the state of Texas and practice elsewhere.
Before you give too much credit to Dan Poulter (MP & doctor) for abandoning the Tories to join Labour, don't forget he's been an MP for 14 years & been working as a doctor all that time.... so one might have expected him to notice the Tory engineered crisis in the NHS quite some time before now.
No, he's defecting because he can see the Tory electoral meltdown coming & wants to preserve his happy position of having two well-paying jobs.
"The extent to which conversation has been silenced is evident from a STAT survey of 100 hospitals — two from each state — asking to speak with physicians about changes in maternal health care since the Dobbs ruling. Only six institutions made physicians available to speak about their work, and five of them were in states where abortion access remains protected."
Hmmm... so Doctors are over-burdened & their working lives need to be improved. But cutting the requirements for mandatory additional in-career training seems an odd area to focus on.
Odd, that is, unless you start from the position that it will be impossible to expand the number of doctors in the mid-term & so easing off their hours cannot come from increasing the workforce.
This looks like NHS England trying to make the best of an impossible situation.
#Republicans initially resisted Democrats’ attempts to repeal the #law last week. But as Democrats slammed the ban — which allows only an exception to save the life of the mother, & says #doctors prosecuted under the law could face fines & #prison terms of 2-5 yrs.
#ClimateDiary It seems, IS, utterly crazy, that amidst everything else the UK government is ruthlessly continuing its clampdown on climate protesters. But it is.
Excellent article by Natasha Walter here on how Dr Sarah Benn got 30 days in prison for holding up a placard saying “Stop New Oil” and overall recent developments:
“the direction of travel is fast and frightening and its repercussions are growing.”
#ClimateDiary and now Dr Benn has also been found guilty of professional msiconduct, by a Medical Practitioners Tribunal. This is deeply wrong. Holding up a sign and protesting - for planetary, human health! - does not constitute medical misconduct. I hope many #doctors will speak up against this. #NHS#JustStopOil#ExtinctionRebellion
A #Houston#hospital is investigating whether a #doctor altered a #transplant list to make his patients ineligible for care. A disproportionate number of them have died while waiting for new #organs.
…Ofcls began investigating after…a complaint. An analysis found what the #hospital called “irregularities” in how #patients were classified on a #WaitingList for liver #transplants. When #doctors place a patient on the list, they identify types of #donors they would consider, incl’g age & weight.
Hospital ofcls said they found patients had been listed as accepting only donors w/ages & weights that were impossible—for instance, a 300-lb toddler—making them unable to receive any transplant.
And so it ends.... NHS consultants have voted to accept an improved pay offer (which is more generous than before to consultants of less than seven years seniority)....
No doubt, Victoria Atkins hopes this will draw support away from the continuing dispute with the Junior Doctors.
However, this still looks like fiddling while Rome burns as regards the more general malaise in the NHS
"The loss of a trusted doctor is never easy, and it’s an experience that is increasingly common.
The stress of the pandemic drove a lot of health care workers to retire or quit. Now, a nationwide shortage of doctors and others who provide primary care is making it hard to find replacements. And as patients are shuffled from one provider to the next, it’s eroding their trust in the health system."