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Ah, the seamy underside of cost-effectiveness research. Doc Gurley has done cost-effectiveness research, including published studies, in one of her many previous careers (Doc G assessment: not as interesting as waitressing, fewer tips, more messes, fewer laughs). There is a nasty, secretive part of cost-effectiveness health research that no one publicly discusses which (shockingly!) made […] In hospitals, if you’ve gotten a patient all better and discharged them, only to find your patient back in the emergency room in less than 72 hours, that scenario is called a bounce-back. Bounce-back is a word that carries a lot of negative connotation–when you say it, you kind of sneer it at someone “hey, […] In another egg-on-our-face medical moment, researchers have shown that giving anti-psychotic medicine to prevent aggressive behavior in patients with severe intellectual impairment is actually (drumroll please) worse than placebo. That’s right. The infamous, low-cost, no-side-effect sugar pill waayy out-performed new, expensive (or old) anti-psychotics in a true double-blind test that included the caregiver’s impression as […] More heartbreak. The New York City Coroner announced today that Heath Ledger’s death was an accidental overdose. The word accidental is insider code for the fact that none of the blood levels of any one of his medicines was high enough to mean that Heath Ledger tried to kill himself–they were all in the range […] You wouldn’t think that watching burly guys with plastic bubbles on their heads slamming together would have a lot of impact on your health, would you? Au contraire–the world of health science is mesmerized by what I call the Super Bowl Effect. Almost every year a new finding is released by researchers that shows just […] If you grew up in the rural South like Doc Gurley, your childhood memories include such everyday events as peeling all the epithelium off both knees and elbows, stubbing the entire top off both big toes, and then sliding into so much dirt with said injuries that the injured skin looked like a new, high-tech […] |
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