Essential Tremor Clinicals Start Successfully!
A promising new, noninvasive treatment for patients with essential tremor is making headlines this week. As announced yesterday in a Focused Ultrasound Surgery Foundation press release, a clinical trial at…
Feds to Regulate Rocket Fuel Levels in Tap Water
After nearly a decade of inaction, the US government is finally going to set safety standards for perchlorate in the nation’s water supply. Perchlorate is a rocket fuel additive that…
How Patient Satisfaction Surveys Really Help
Physicians are understandably skeptical about the validity and usefulness of patient satisfaction and experience ratings. Yet after reading Moving the needle on satisfaction scores in Today’s Hospitalist, I’m encouraged to…
Nurses’ Strike Cost $6 Million
We are seeing more and more of this to where sides can’t sit down and negotiate. We had it at Kaiser in southern California a couple weeks ago. Most of…
HCA IPO – $3.8 Billion!
HCA operates 164 hospitals and 106 surgery centers in the United States and Britain. It was just last month that they announced their re-organization plans prior to the IPO. Late…
Slush Fund: What Did They Know? When Did They Know It?
Rep. Michele Bachmann asserted on Meet the Press that a $105 billion dollar slush fund was buried in the 2,700 page Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) “secretly, unbeknownst…
Wait Until FY 2012 on Meaningful Use
Anthony Guerra pointed me to an article by Protima Advani at iHealthBeat which contains some very important advice about whether you should consider attesting to Meaningful Use (MU) and go…
Medicaid is Worse than Being Uninsured
This is Scott Gottlieb, writing in The Wall Street Journal: A 2010 study…published in the medical journal Cancer, found that Medicaid patients and people lacking any health insurance were both…
UCLA Performs Hand Transplant
The UCLA Hand Transplant Program is just beginning and the donor came from San Diego. This is not a one person surgery as it took a team of 17. It’s…
Smiles Make the World Go Around
A blog post in the Wall Street Journal Online explains why it is so important to smile. Smiling is contagious. It also lowers stress hormones and boosts positive ones. Brain…
