A front-page NY Times article about a Maryland doctor, “Family Physician Can’t Give Away Solo Practice” on page 1 April 23, 2011, explores the decline of personalized solo practice and acknowledges that “a centuries-old intimacy between doctor and patient” is being lost. Dr. Kanner comments in letter to editor.
If you are uninsured and need serious medical care, your costs are almost unimaginably higher than you pay as an insured person. Some illustrations to underscore why we must change the insurance rules to get everyone into the system.
Ginkgo biloba was just shown to be ineffective to prevent cognitive decline in a large, randomized and controlled trial of over 3000 older adults followed for over 6 years in an NIH-sponsored multi-center study published in JAMA. Applying critical evaluation to all purported therapies.
The Mass Dept. of Public Health just sent us sufficient supplies and authorization to offer the H1N1 to everyone, not just high risk patients. Clearly this is a day late and a dollar short. Nevertheless, we will have flu clinics in the office this week and next week. We encourage you to come.
We will receive our first shipment of H1N1 vaccine by Monday. The staff is calling everyone we believe to be higher risk to get their shot early next week. More vaccine should arrive weekly so everyone who wants H1N1 vaccine should be able to get it over the next 3 weeks. At last.
A preventive medicine task force just suggested that women not have mammograms in their 40’s and should only be screened every two years after that. And don’t bother with breast self-exam or your doctor’s breast exam. And the gynecologists’ task force declared that no women should have Pap smears before age 21 and less frequently thereafter. What to make of this? Ask your doctor, they say. How do we make sense of this?
We have a short break in seasonal flu shot availability because production was stopped to allow conversion to H1N1. Full supplies should arrive in November, in plenty of time for the normal flu that starts in late December.
We need first to tackle the basic issues of health insurance. Preexisting conditions and other inequities. Do individuals get treated like groups? Are groups all treated the same? What is the range of insurance costs attributed to people of different ages? Ultimately, we must get everyone an affordable ticket to the health care arena. That’s what the fight is about. Then we need to manage our resources better.
Information about H1N1 influenza and the forthcoming vaccine continues to evolve. Here is a summary of our most recent updates and recommendations.
Why our health care system is so wonderful and so dysfunctional is an immensely complex tale that is of immediate political importance to understand. Introduction to a planned series of reports.