dragoni reblogged
There’s only one Hippocratic Oath.
If you can’t support the oath then become a Republican wedding cake baker or evangelical.
The doctors who wrote the prescriptions should be charged and never allowed to practice again #HippocraticOath “do no harm“.
According to the Department of Justice, John Kapoor, 74, of Phoenix, Arizona, used bribes, kickbacks, and other fraudulent practices to get doctors to overprescribe the fentanyl drug, called Subsys. Fentanyl is a highly addictive synthetic opioid that can be up to 100 times more potent than morphine. As such, Subsys is only intended to treat severe pain in cancer patients. But according to the DOJ, many patients receiving Subsys didn’t have cancer.
The DOJ alleges that Kapoor, along with six former executives at Insys, paid doctors and pain clinics in various states to write “large numbers of prescriptions.” The department also alleges that Insys used fraudulent means to get health insurance providers to cover the harmful prescriptions.
Last month, a Senate investigation led by Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), released an audio recording of an Insys representative lying to a pharmaceutical benefit manager in order to get an inappropriate Subsys prescription covered. In that case, the patient—who did not have cancer—later died from an adverse reaction to the drug.
Source: news.ycombinator.com
dragoni reblogged
black-to-the-bones-deactivated2
Each one of these women has an amazing story to tell, but we know nothing about them. This history is hidden from us, because they are women of color.
Their names are Dr Anandibai Joshi, class of 1886; Dr Kei Okami, class of 1889; and Dr Sabat Islambooly, class of 1890.
Dr Joshi was the first Indian woman to earn an MD; her Wikipedia page has the broad details of her life story. She argued that she should go to medical school due to “a growing need for Hindu lady doctors in India”, and was apparently the only student with the stomach to last through a demonstration autopsy of an infant. She died of tuberculosis in 1887, aged just 21 years old, but was such a remarkable figure that her first biography was published in 1888; since then there have been multiple biographies, a novel, a play, and a Hindi serial about her life. Drexel University has quite a few more documents about her in their archives.
Dr Okami was the first Japanese woman to earn a degree in Western medicine from a Western university; she also has a Wikipedia page which gives an overview of her life. Among other things she was appointed to head the gynaecology unit at Jikei Hospital in Tokyo, but resigned after Emperor Meiji visited the hospital and refused to receive her because she was a woman.
Dr Islambooly is the least well-known; her life was mostly undocumented after she returned home to Syria as the country’s first female physician. She was apparently a Kurdish Jewish woman who later moved to Cairo, where she died in 1941.
Most people know about Florence Nightingale. More should learn about Margaret Ann Bulkley aka Dr. James Barry. Spoiler: there’s a direct connection between Florence and Margaret Ann.
Barry became the first doctor in the British Empire to perform a successful cesarean operation. It was one of many major medical contributions the Irish surgeon accomplished for the British military, from enforcing stricter standards for hygiene, improving the diet of sick patients, to popularizing a plant-based treatment for syphilis and gonorrhea. Barry served around the globe, eventually earning the title of Inspector General, the second most senior medical position in the British Army.
Born in 1789 in Merchant’s Quay, Cork, Ireland to a grocer father, Margaret Ann Bulkley was a sociable and outgoing child. As a young girl, she once wrote of her desire for “a sword and a pair of colours [military uniform].”
Her mother sought the help of her older brother in London, the famed Irish artist James Barry. The artist had a difficult personality, however, and was not welcoming to his sister’s family when they arrived in London. Yet Barry introduced Margaret to his elite circle of friends, some of whom offered her teaching and mentorship. Margaret did not have the social standing to marry well, but her family hoped she could study to become a teacher or governess.
While mentoring his new charge, the Venezuelan general and revolutionary Francisco Miranda became impressed by Bulkley’s intelligence. He was the first friend of Barry’s to encourage Bulkley to take on the persona of a man to enter the male-dominated field of medicine. After Margaret graduated from medical school, he reasoned, Bulkley could shed this disguise and practice freely as a woman doctor in Venezuela. Miranda proposed she use her medical skills in his revolutionary efforts in Caracas, Venezuela.
In 1806, her uncle James Barry passed away and left his fortune to the family. In turn, Bulkley assumed Barry’s name and used the money to finance three years of medical studies at the University of Edinburgh beginning in December 1809.
It wasn’t until after Barry’s death in 1865, that the doctor’s secret was finally discovered.
From Wikipedia
During the Crimean War (1854–1856), he got into an argument with Florence Nightingale.[8] After Barry's death Nightingale wrote that:
"I never had such a blackguard rating in all my life – I who have had more than any woman – than from this Barry sitting on his horse, while I was crossing the Hospital Square with only my cap on in the sun. He kept me standing in the midst of quite a crowd of soldiers, Commissariat, servants, camp followers, etc., etc., every one of whom behaved like a gentleman during the scolding I received while he behaved like a brute . . . After he was dead, I was told that (Barry) was a woman . . . I should say that (Barry) was the most hardened creature I ever met."[19]
Source: news.ycombinator.com
Big Pharma and the Hippocratic Oath - “ I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A federal program maintains this database, which is a product of the Sunshine Act, part of the Affordable Care Act.
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The most a single physician got paid in 2014 was almost $44M. The interesting thing is that for this physician and several other top paid physicians, almost the entire total came from payments that were categorized is this unhelpfully-named category, “Compensation for services other than consulting, including serving as faculty or as a speaker at a venue other than a continuing education program” (orange).
A large majority of the other of the top paid physicians got paid primarily from “Royalty or License” (green), which makes sense: a surgeon may invent a new surgical technique and license it to a medical device company.
Another interesting phenomenon is that a handful of doctors in the top 100 earners were paid by industry solely for their research (purple). The status quo of industry having all the money and thus paying/funding research–sometimes both the design of and execution of the research–can create incentives with negative consequences for the validity of the results.
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Out of the $6.5B total payments to physicians in 2014, $3.2B, or almost half, of those payments were for research. We can see this when aggregating the payments by the name of the drug or device manufacturer: companies like Genentech, Pfizer, and Novartis dominate the dollar amount of payments made to physicians, and most of their payments are for “Research” (brown). Further down the line, you can see medical device manufacturers like Stryker and Medtronic paying physicians mostly for “Royalty and License” (green).
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By looking at the data, we can find which physicians got paid the most for “Entertainment”, “Food and Beverage”, and “Travel and Lodging”. But we won’t know for sure, because remember, all this payment data is reported by the healthcare industry themselves, and while there are some financial penalties for inaccurate reports, I don’t see an easy way for the government to verify the validity of the data.
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The “worst offenders” were essentially given, by industry, $60 meals three meals a day for every day of the year, went on $590 per day trips, and spent $43 a day (about $300 a week) for entertainment and fun. Sounds like the life (except a little more on the entertainment and fun please).
Source: news.ycombinator.com
It’s no wonder then that America’s problem with overmedication hides in plain sight. While we’re all dimly aware that we take a lot of pills, we have no intuition of how big the problem is. And when you lay out the stats, the figures are nothing short of terrifying, as this infographic shows. While it suffers from rhetorical bombast, the tensions suggested by the chart are stark: Even though we take tons of pills, they seldom actually work. So while 1/2 of all Americans take a prescription drug and 1/4 of women take an anti-depressant, prescription drugs only seem to work 30% of the time. Meanwhile, 85% of new drugs have been found to have little or no benefit. And those miracle anti-depressants? They don’t even outperform placebos:
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Doctors know that. They know what’s expected of them. They know that telling someone, "Hey, your problem will probably go away on its own in three weeks," is a good recipe for going out of business. The question is, will our belief in a little magic pill ever go away, even when the pills lose their magic?
Source: fastcodesign.com