Answers To Diseases

Health Affairs recently published an interview with Kerry Weems, former acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. In the interview, inaccurate statements were made about the role of the AMA/Specialty Society RVS Update Committee (RUC), which advises CMS regarding the relative levels of reimbursement for different medical procedures performed by physicians.
Every time [...]

Last week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration sent a warning letter to the makers of Zicam concerning two products: Zicam Cold Remedy Nasal Gel and Zicam Cold Remedy Nasal Swabs. (A third, discontinued product was also mentioned.

I’m currently taking two different types of antibiotics to treat an infected cat bite (ah the joys of working with animals). Here’s a fun fact: the doctor told me that eighty percent of cat bites end up infected. I guess I’ve been lucky so far — I’ve only had two bites get [...]

Orac, a general surgeon who blogs at Respectful Insolence, writes the most comprehensive entry I’ve seen thus far on Apple’s Steve Jobs’ liver transplant.
For those interested in the medicine behind the transplant, go and read his post in its entirety. I’d like to highlight some of the potentially questionable ethics surrounding the case.

No matter how well you clean, there are some places around the house (or office) that tend to accumulate dirt and bacteria. You might know some of these already… or you might be surprised!
Your mattress and pillows. The bedroom is a favorite spot for those evil allergy triggers: dust mites.

Lately, I feel like I’m a lot clumsier than usual. Case in point: two nights in a row, I’ve spilled my lemonade — once on the couch, once in the office. Yesterday, I really raised the clumsiness bar by spilling a bowl of handmade glass ornaments and then stepping on them.

Should Americans be able to enroll in a newly created, publicly administered health insurance option as the nation works to expand health coverage? That question isat the center of the current health reform debate. It is also thesubject of the latest health policy brief from Health Affairs and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), which [...]