"Health & Medical News"

Physicians say a Missouri Supreme Court ruling, though narrow, recognizes the significance of medical staff bylaws and offers doctors some recourse in the face of unfair discipline.

Breaking with a 43-year-old precedent, a unanimous high court opened the door for medical staff members to sue hospitals over privileging disputes if the facilities fail to follow staff bylaws. Justices departed from a long-held principle that hospital privileging decisions were not subject to judicial review, noting that was the “nationwide majority rule” at the time of the high court’s 1965 decision.

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Washington — A new Medicare coverage policy on drug treatment for anemic cancer patients is hurting care, according to a survey of doctors released last month.

Ninety-one percent of oncologists and hematologists reported adverse patient events in the 12 weeks after the July 30 implementation of the national coverage determination on erythropoiesis-stimulating agents. The poll was sponsored by U.S. Oncology, which funds, develops, and helps manage 443 cancer centers in 39 states. It surveyed 307 physicians from Nov. 26, 2007, to Dec. 11, 2007. The organization limited the number of affiliated physicians involved in the poll to 20% of all respondents.

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Doctors agree on the basic tenets of medical professionalism, but they frequently fail to live up to those ideals in practice, according to a survey of more than 1,600 physicians in the Dec. 4 Annals of Internal Medicine.

Nearly all of the physicians surveyed agreed doctors should use medical resources appropriately, tell patients the truth, minimize disparities, see patients regardless of their ability to pay, maintain board certifications, evaluate peers’ care, avoid sex with patients, work on quality initiatives, disclose conflicts of interest, report impaired or incompetent physicians, and report medical errors.

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Washington — As more Americans ditch their traditional home telephones in favor of cell phones, researchers who keep tabs on the nation’s health via telephone are becoming increasingly concerned that important segments of the population are being missed.

For the first time, bias threatens surveillance systems used by state and local health departments to establish policies on an enormous range of health behaviors, from alcohol use and smoking to diabetes awareness and who’s getting a flu shot. The fear is that population-wide interventions could be off-target, and even physicians’ understanding of patients’ health risks may be somewhat askew.

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Washington — Adolescents were included for the first time in a large national survey on immunization rates, and the news is good and not so good depending on the vaccine in question.

More than 84% of teens had received three or more doses of the hepatitis B vaccine — in use for about 15 years — and 89% received two or more doses of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine — in use for decades. But only 11% received the Tdap shot, and about 12% were immunized with the meningococcal conjugate vaccine.

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Physicians frequently miss the connection between their patients’ symptoms and some well-known side effects of HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors, according to a new study based on reports from 650 patients.

When patients taking statins complained to their doctors about muscle weakness or pain, cognitive problems such as memory loss and other symptoms, physicians dismissed the possibility of adverse drug reactions nearly a third of the time, researchers concluded.

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Popularity: 4% [?]

About a third of teens surveyed say they see only a slight risk — or no risk at all — in trying methamphetamine, the Associated Press reported Sept. 18. However, 76 percent of teens said they strongly disapproved of using the drug even once or twice.

The study by The Meth Project also found that around a quarter of the 2,602 teens surveyed said they believed that meth use could have some benefits, such as providing feelings of happiness or euphoria (24 percent), helping with weight loss (22 percent), and relieving boredom (22 percent).

Popularity: 3% [?]

By Bob Curley

Fewer adolescents are telling federal researchers that they use marijuana, but the 2006 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) reported that most indicators of alcohol, tobacco and other drug use remain relatively unchanged from 2005.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) unveiled the survey results on Sept. 6, with federal officials touting a 25-percent reported decline in marijuana use among male youths between 2002 and 2006 but fretting over the 2.2 million new nonmedical users of prescription drugs, including narcotic painkillers. Most users of prescription drugs for recreational reasons reported getting the drugs free from friends or family members.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Uninsured Sacramento Residents Pay 68 Percent More than the Federal Government

SACRAMENTO—Uninsured consumers in Sacramento pay 68 percent more for common prescription drugs than the federal government does for the same medications, according to, “Paying the Price: The High Cost of Prescription Drugs for Uninsured Californians” a new California Public Interest Research Group (CALPIRG) Education Fund report released today.

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Popularity: 6% [?]