Diet and Nutrition. Natural Health, and Healthy Living

Patient advocacy groups, most of them drug industry-funded, have asked President-elect Barack Obama to appoint a Food and Drug Administration commissioner who won't cave in to pressure from lawmakers or the news media, according to the Wall Street Journal.

It is news to me that the news media has much say about decisions at FDA. There are reporters who highlight problems, especially safety problems, in the nation's food and drug supply. And there are reporters who highlight every study suggesting the next miracle cure is just around the corner. Large news organizations like the New York Times have both. For every Gardiner Harris, there is a Gina Kolata. The news media are megaphones. They are not, to use someone else's phrase, the decider.

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The New York Times published a story this month about one of the biggest medical trials ever organized by the federal government, a study that showed that the newest, most expensive drugs used to treat high blood pressure (a.k.a. hypertension) work no better than inexpensive diuretics—water pills that flush excess fluid and salt from the body. Moreover, the research revealed that the pricier drugs increase the risk of heart failure and stroke.

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This week, Don Berwick will announce the results of the 5 Million Lives Campaign before thousands of people in Nashville attending the National Forum on Quality Improvement in Health Care.

Twenty years ago, it was almost heretical to question the quality of American health care. The common refrain being that it was unarguably the best in the world.

Decades of work by Berwick and others, however, have dispelled that myth, and the underlying belief that medical errors and hospital acquired infections are simply an artifact of the business. These quality champions deem it unacceptable that as many as 98,000 Americans die annually from preventable medical errors, and that most Americans receive the recommended care only half the time. They've spent years building their case, and in turn created a social movement around their cause.

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Last week, I participated in a very cool live podcast with the ReadWriteWeb editor Richard Macmanus. While I am finishing up my commentary based on that experience, I did want to comment on another post by Richard who is one year into his diagnosis of Type I Diabetes. He mentioned that his favorite Health 2.0 application was MyMedLab.

In full disclosure, I serve as an advisor to the company as well as a participant on the call that was conducted. I became involved with MyMedLab while conducting my own survey of promising Health 2.0 companies, tools, and technology. I was intrigued by their Health 2.0 delivery model of leveraging the internet to remove inefficiencies of time, location, and physician approval for routine wellness laboratory testing.

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Americans spend more money on health care than any other nation, but get far less in return, say multiple health care executives in Sunday's Washington Post.

That's not news to readers of this blog, but probably is not yet common knowledge among the general American taxpayer. That might change. The news media seems to be writing about this "value gap" more frequently, particularly in citing the growing momentum behind creating a center for comparative effectiveness research to evaluate drugs, devices and treatments to find out what works best.

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Health care costs in the U.S. are approaching 17 percent of the GDP and may be as high as 20 percent in the next few years.

What is causing the US to have the highest cost and lowest value for the healthcare dollar? Simple - it's overtreatment.

Overtreatment takes many forms - from over ordering expensive diagnostic tests to the prescribing of expensive and sometimes unneeded therapeutics.

There are many reasons for this. Here are just a few:

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As we begin the health care reform discussion in earnest, many are pointing out all of the waste in the system and the need to research what works best, provide the incentives to do it, manage the big spenders’ chronic care better, make better use of heath information technology, and encourage wellness and prevention.

One of the disadvantages of being at this for more than 20 years is that I feel like I’ve seen this movie a few times before. You may recall the picture "Groundhog Day" where the guy kept living through the same thing time after time.

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The American Medical Informatics Association will announce today that it has received a $1.2 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to promote health informatics and biomedical education and training worldwide, particularly in developing countries.

This will be the first project of a new program called 20/20, in which the International Medical Informatics Association and its regional affiliates, including AMIA, will attempt to train 20,000 informatics professionals globally by 2020. This is an outgrowth of the AMIA 10x10 program to train 10,000 people in informatics in the U.S. by 2010. IMIA will present details of 20/20 this week at the Wellcome Trust in London.

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By Gregory Kellett, a cognitive neuroscience researcher at SFSU and UCSF, and science writer for Lumos Labs.

Recent findings have linked exercising regularly with increased cerebral blood flow and a greater number of blood vessels in the brain.

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Advances in medical technology, electronic medical education and the advent of digital tools in medical practices have led to a proliferation of digital multimedia content with educational merit.

Over the past decade, physicians have adopted cutting-edge imaging technologies to make diagnoses, capture clinical exam findings and monitor disease progression. On a daily basis, hundreds of research presentations, grand rounds and didactic lectures are created all over the country. Similarly, the medical and life sciences industries generate enormous amounts of peer-reviewed content to educate physicians and clinician scientists that go way beyond CME.

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