health care

Fifty-eight percent of primary care doctors in the U.S. report their patients often have difficulty paying for medications and care, and half of U.S. doctors spend substantial time dealing with restrictions insurance companies place on their patients’ care, according to findings from the 2009 Commonwealth Fund International Health Policy Survey published online today in the [...]

Lack of health insurance might have led or contributed to nearly 17,000 deaths among hospitalized children in the United States in the span of less than two decades, according to research led by the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center.
According to the Hopkins researchers, the study, to be published Oct. 30 in the Journal of Public Health, [...]

Survey results published recently in the journal Health Affairs show that while only 27 percent of adults currently support the U.S. Senate Finance Committee’s proposed healthcare legislation, an amended bill could gain the majority’s favor.
The poll was created and commissioned by S. Ward Casscells, M.D., vice president of external affairs and public policy and the [...]

Daniel Bates of The Daily Mail writes:
Professor Stephen Hawking has spoken out in defence of the NHS after high-level U.S. politicians have branded the National Health Service ‘evil’ and ‘Orwellian.’
The British professor, who has suffered from Lou Gehrig’s disease for 40 years, insisted that he ‘would not be here’ were it not for the NHS.
He [...]

New research published in the April issue of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons suggests that, among surgeons inexperienced in laparoscopic techniques, closing incisions using robotic-assisted laparoscopic surgery (RALS) requires less time to learn and results in improved outcomes compared with suturing done via traditional, “open” surgery or with freehand laparoscopy.
Laparoscopic suturing — [...]

In results from the largest health policy study of its kind, a Mexican health care program created in 2003 has been found effective in reducing crippling health care costs among poorer households. The results reflect the success of the Seguro Popular program, and arise from an evaluation conducted by researchers, including a Princeton University faculty [...]

A paramount topic at the moment is value in health care: What should we pay for and how much? Resources aren’t unlimited, and desires or demands for health care should be balanced against various realities — including the effectiveness of care or the desire for other goods and services. Especially in a depressed economy, questions [...]

Many of the greatest inventions in modern medicine were developed by physicists who imported technologies such as X rays, nuclear magnetic resonance, ultrasound, particle accelerators and radioisotope tagging and detection techniques into the medical domain. There they became magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computerized tomography (CT) scanning, nuclear medicine, positron emission tomography (PET) scanning, and various [...]