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Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Children’s Hospital Boston held on to the top spots for general pediatrics in the 2008 America’s Best Children’s Hospitals ranking. [U.S. News & World Report]
Raghu wants to know why CVS sold her a bottle of Tears Naturale PM that expired last year. We’re all for pushing expiration dates, but not with year-old preservative-free medicine that is meant to stay in your eye overnight.
Between November of last year and this past January, the FDA “cited 49 areas of concern, including a failure to follow good manufacturing practices” at Merck & Co. Inc’s vaccine plant in Pennsylvania. A Merck spokesman says that most of the incidents were found and reported by Merck’s own employees, and that they occurred in the manufacturing process, not the vaccines themselves: “He stressed that no contamination was found in finished vaccines and that Merck was addressing all the problems.”
GlaxoSmithKline is buying a U.S. biotechnology company that is researching resveratrol, the chemical compound found in red wine that may retard the aging process. The CEO of the company says that “drugs that mimic resveratrol, by activating enzymes called sirtuins, could ‘treat in a safe, natural new way, many of the major killers of western society.'” We can’t wait to see the commercials that GSK puts out for this one.
Researchers have identified the chemical in the contaminated blood thinner Heparin that killed 81 people in the U.S. and made patients here and in Europe sick:The researchers freeze-dried the heparin and used a combination of nuclear magnetic resonance imaging and liquid chromatography-mass…
Tina claims that last December she had her prescription filled at a Dallas Walgreens store, and was surprised to see that the pills had changed.
Primary Physician Care, a privately-owned insurance company based in Charlotte, North Carolina, has now twice refused to pay for a 3-year-old’s special leukemia treatment recommended by doctors at Duke University Hospital—even after the child’s mother called the insurance company and spoke…
Lifestyle Lift claims it’s a “minor one-hour procedure with major results,” but a lot of customers who have paid for the procedure have been left unhappy, and they’ve consequently posted reviews about it on a plastic surgery review blog called RealSelf. Lifestyle Lift has sued RealSelf, claiming trademark infringement, and now RealSelf has countersued, claiming Lifestyle Lift padded RealSelf’s site with shill reviews.
Americans already save money by purchasing prescription drugs from Canada and getting plastic surgery in South America.
Barabara Antonelli was strapped onto a gurney and breathing through an oxygen mask when her doctor’s receptionist bounded up to her ambulance and said: “I hate to bother you, but could you give me the $5 co-pay?”
Gout sounds like something characters in Dickens novels get, but apparently it’s a modern affliction as well—at least in the U.S. where the number of cases has doubled in the past few decades. Now researchers are saying that “Men who consume two or more sugary soft drinks a day have an 85% higher risk of gout compared with those who drink less than one a month.”
Several of the doctors who were involved in clinical research trials of a new back injury treatment, Prodisc, were also early investors in the product and had a financial incentive to see it succeed, reports the New York Times. This may have led to its success as a treatment being overstated.
Citibank and Bank of America both offer special credit card programs based on health and medical expenses. If you’re disciplined about not carrying revolving debt, and you have recurring medical expenses, they can help reduce your total cost over a year. Bank of America’s cards are point-based programs—if you’ve got Aetna insurance, you can accumulate points that you can turn into “cash direct deposits to a health savings account, or other standard rewards.” Caremark members can redeem points for awards only, although BoA’s standard awards catalogue “includes health and wellness products like fitness equipment and blood pressure monitors.”
The U.S. Institute of Medicine called on Congress today to “establish a single national resource of health information.” The resource would collect all available data on every drug in the marketplace, and be available to consumers to educate themselves about any and all possible treatments in order to make better-informed decisions with their doctors.
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A clinical trial of Zetia, a popularly prescribed cholesterol-lowering drug, “failed to show that the drug has any medical benefits.” In fact, fatty plaques grew almost twice as fast in patients who took Zetia along with Zocor in a combo product called Vytorin. However, “patients who are taking Vytorin or Zetia should talk to their doctors if they are concerned and not discontinue taking the medicines on their own.” [New York Times]
A new study—”the most thorough to date,” writes the New York Times—shows that about a third of the studies for some of the market’s most successful antidepressants (Paxil, Prozac, Zoloft, Effexor) were never published because they didn’t have favorable results. “While 94 percent of the positive studies found their way into print, just 14 percent of those with disappointing or uncertain results did.” The implication is that the makers of these drugs intentionally misled consumers and the federal government on their effectiveness.
For most people, when you’re at a point in life where you need surgery, you’re not feeling exactly empowered or willing to grill your doctor on his or her exact qualifications. But you should, says—of all groups—the American College of Surgeons. Thomas Russell, the organization’s executive director and a surgeon, says, “Patients should feel free to ask their surgeon anything they want answered about the operation or the surgeon’s competency to perform it. There are no questions that should be off the table.”
A new article published today in Clinical Cancer Research says that two men “developed aggressive and incurable prostate cancer within months of taking the same supplement.” The doctors examined the supplement and discovered it contained testosterone and estradiol, and “when they tested it on tumor cells in the lab, they found it fueled the growth of prostate cancer cells more potently than testosterone alone.” Either don’t take herbal/hormonal dietary supplements, they urge, or make sure you fully disclose to your doctor what you’re taking.
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