Obama Selects Health Policy Advocate as Surgeon General

Today's post was shared by RWJF PublicHealth and comes from www.nytimes.com

President Obama nominated Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, an early supporter and grass-roots advocate for the Affordable Care Act, as surgeon general on Thursday. Dr. Murthy, 36, is a founder and the president of Doctors for America, a group that campaigned for the health care law before Congress passed it in 2010 and that was an outgrowth of Doctors for Obama, which worked to help elect the president in 2008. He is a doctor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and an instructor at Harvard Medical School. At a Rose Garden event in October 2009, held as the Senate Finance Committee was set to vote on the legislation, Dr. Murthy said that Mr. Obama “understands that the current system isn’t working for patients, but it’s also not working for doctors.” Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, said Thursday in a statement that Dr. Murthy “will be a powerful messenger” on health policy. His nomination is subject to Senate approval. Last year, he was the co-author of an article for The New Republic responding to criticism of the health care law and citing its support among doctors, although it acknowledged qualms among them. “Doctors will support the new law to the extent that it becomes visible in their everyday lives, and make these lives better,” it said. He also has been a leader in H.I.V. prevention and AIDS education in both the United States and India. In 1995, he helped found Visions, a nonprofit AIDS and...

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Exercise 'can be as good as pills'

Medication can be replaced by exercise reports the the BBC. Today's post is shared from bbc.org.

Exercise can be as good a medicine as pills for people with conditions such as heart disease, a study has found.

The work in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) looked at hundreds of trials involving nearly 340,000 patients to assess the merits of exercise and drugs in preventing death.

Physical activity rivalled some heart drugs and outperformed stroke medicine.

The findings suggest exercise should be added to prescriptions, say the researchers. 

Man preparing to jog

Experts stressed that patients should not ditch their drugs for exercise - rather, they should use both in tandem.

Too few adults currently get enough exercise. Only a third of people in England do the recommended 2.5 hours or more of moderate-intensity activity, such as cycling or fast walking, every week.

In contrast, prescription drug rates continue to rise.

There were an average of 17.7 prescriptions for every person in England in 2010, compared with 11.2 in 2000.

For the study, scientists based at the London School of Economics, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute at Harvard Medical School and Stanford University School of Medicine trawled medical literature to find any research that compared exercise with pills as a therapy.

They identified 305 trials to include in their analysis. These trials looked at managing conditions such as existing heart disease, stroke rehabilitation, heart failure and pre-diabetes.

When they studied the data as a whole, they found exercise and drugs were comparable in terms of death rates.

But there were...


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Study: Healthcare-linked infections cost US $10 billion a year

Today's post was shared by CIDRAP and comes from www.cidrap.umn.edu

Five of the most common, costly, and preventable healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) cost the United States nearly $10 billion per year, according to a meta-analysis of 27 years' worth of data by a team from Harvard Medical School and affiliated institutions. The team reviewed data spanning 1986 to 2013 concerning surgical site infections (SSIs), central line–associated bloodstream infections (CLABSIs), catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs), ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP), and Clostridium difficile infections (CDIs), according to their report, released yesterday by JAMA Internal Medicine. For HAI incidence estimates, the investigators used the National Healthcare Safety Network of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which includes 1,700 reporting sites. By conducting a systematic literature review, the team found 26 studies that provided "reasonably robust" estimates of attributable costs and/or length of stay for HAIs. The overall cost of the HAIs was estimated at $9.8 billion annually.  On a per-case basis, CLABSIs were found to be the most expensive HAI at $45,814 each, followed by VAP, $40,144; SSIs, $20,785; CDIs, $11,285; and CAUTIs, $896, the report says. SSIs, however, accounted for the largest share of costs, at 33.7%. The second largest contributor was VAP, at 31.6%, followed by CLABSIs, 18.9%; CDIs, 15.4%; and CAUTIs, less than 1%. "While quality improvement initiatives have decreased HAI...

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Jon L. Gelman of Wayne NJ is the author NJ Workers’ Compensation Law (West-Thompson) and co-author of the national treatise, Modern Workers’ Compensation Law (West-Thompson). For over 4 decades the Law Offices of Jon L Gelman  1.973.696.7900  jon@gelmans.com  have been representing injured workers and their families who have suffered occupational accidents and illnesses.

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