Surviving AmericanSurviving
American Medicine
In America, use of vitamins, nutritional supplements, and herbs is common, ranging from 10 to 95%. In my practice it is about 50%. But shockingly, a new study http://bit.ly/YVzEAx shows that between 20% to 77% of people who were using complementary or alternative medicines did NOT tell their doctor about which complementary or alternative therapies they were taking. People said they kept this a secret because the doctor never asked, or they were afraid of…
Young adults 18 to 35 years of age, including recent graduates, are faced with an important health care challenge: you may have only
a low income (maybe even none), perhaps high student loans, no health conditions or challenges, and you want to know how to protect the quality of and access to your health care. Since you are not sick, why should you even consider getting health insurance coverage, with you knowing it can be really…
The articles and news coverage of problems in how to access American medical care are described as health-care disparities. This is the policy-makers way of talking about poverty, joblessness, or racial/gender/age discrimination. These are all difficult problems to overcome if one is to get good medical care.
It is often stated that many of those conditions occur in a setting of less access to care. But more often, the feeling of less access is more a…
A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine (http://nej.md/TRTJQ1) has indicated that over 30 years, the number of early stage breast cancers detected has increased dramatically, but the number of advanced stage cancers detected has reduced only slightly. The implication of this article is that woman should not have mammograms as frequently, since there is “over diagnosis” of breast cancer due to mammograms. The same arguments have been made for PSA screening…
In America we face periodic shortages – of different foods, gasoline, jobs, loans, and controversially either taxes or spending cuts. but now we are experiencing shortages of drugs because of poor reimbursement of inexpensive generic drugs (which does not provide manufacturers with enough profit to promote production) and limits on factories and importation. Now we know that these shortages…
Oral and throat cancers are serious and life-threatening, and adequate treatment often produces disfiguring scarring, loss of teeth (due to radiation side effects), and dramatic reduction in quality of life.
Prevention of these terrible conditions is effective. Since the disease is caused by smoking and excess drinking, as well as HPV (human papilloma virus, the same virus that causes cervix cancer, vaginal cancer and penis cancer), you can reduce your risk of these serious cancers….
In a spectacular 2013 Academy Awards show, many health and disease issues were in the background. Here are my nominees for my Award for Most Important Performance by an illness or an individual.
Amour, for the portrayal of stroke, cerebrovascular disease, and caregivers Silver Linings Playbook, for the portrayals of mental illnesses and adjustment to illness Michael Douglas, for demonstration of outstanding survivorship after throat cancer and its treatment Robin Roberts, for her appearance on…
Alcohol abuse has always been common. Now new information has discovered how frequently this occurs in young high school students as discussed in this CDC report http://1.usa.gov/VNlAGA. Binge drinking occurs in 17.1% of Americans, 11% of women and 23% of men. But in high school girls, 20% are binge drinkers (4 drinks per occasion or more at least once in the last 30 days). In high school girls 54% report using alcohol, and 50% of…
A friend who works as an actor in health dramas is also a patient and a caregiver for an ill parent. We discussed the relevance of TV depictions of medical care and real-life health care issues.
TV programs are presenting issues that people are dealing with every day. Although TV scripts tend to over-dramatize the emotional consequences of problems in medical care (e.g. too little time for doctors and nurses to provide adequate care, insensitivity…