The Daily HIT

Here’s an ethical dilemma. Do you agree that it’s a good idea to pay people to fake symptoms in order to determine how doctors treat them? That’s a question under consideration by the American Medical Association House of Delegates, which meets this week. Some doctors think it’s an appalling idea, others strongly endorse it. What do you think?

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Edwina Froehlich, who helped found La Leche League to support breast-feeding after being told at the age of 35 that she was too old to make breast milk for her baby, died Sunday in Arlington Heights, Illinois. She was 93. From the New York Times obituary, an inspiring story: At a time when most pediatricians encouraged [...]

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After students in my clinical nutrition class see the scientific evidence confirming the adverse health consequences of eating substantial amounts of meat on a regular basis — and the evidence is overwhelming enough that mainline groups like the American Cancer Society recommend cutting back — many of them want to know how to take the [...]

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For anyone unconvinced that ”waste, fraud and abuse” in health care are part of the unsustainable cost escalation that threatens the stability of the system as a whole, this article from the Washington Post should be a wake-up call. That the industry is actually defending its practice of charging Medicare double or triple what the equipment costs online would [...]

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As someone who just expanded my vegetable garden and who loves the local organic farmers market in Kansas City, I find the following study at the University of North Carolina to be precisely the kind of cross-disciplinary research that is needed. A small number of studies are starting to appear in the nutritional research literature [...]

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To follow up on a June 2 Daily HIT post, a massive study has been approved in Britain to evaluate whether the long-term use of mobile phones causes brain cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. It is important to remember that the study might conclude that there is no problem with cell phone use. On the other [...]

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Ezra Klein writes insightful and often thought-provoking articles on health care reform. Today, he posts a graph that clearly demonstrates that quality delivery of health care does not vary in proportion to dollars spent on that care. Other factors are clearly part of the equation. From the Dartmouth Atlas, this graph summarizes Medicare data from [...]

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An article I co-authored was recently published in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, a scholarly journal now in its 13th year. It’s a survey of chiropractors and chiropractic faculty in which we asked a number of questions, most importantly whether the respondents felt that chiropractic should be identified as part of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). [...]

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Mainstream news reporting of health news too often emphasizes the positive aspects of new developments while downplaying or ignoring negative side effects. An editorial at the online medical journal PloS Medicine, “False Hopes, Unwarranted Fears: The Trouble with Medical News Stories,”  calls for greater vigilance and responsibility by both producers and consumers (doctors, patients) of [...]

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Research has for the most part failed to validate the cell phone-brain tumor hypothesis, but the information gaps that remain cause some neurosurgeons to be concerned enough to always use an earpiece when talking on their cells. The largest gaps in our understanding relate to long term use and extensive use by young people, whose [...]

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