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Posts tagged in the news

Biopsy Anxiety

One of my colleagues just pointed out this interesting post from the New York Times Well Blog. It’s a commentary on a recent paper published in the journal Radiology which followed cortisol levels of women waiting for breast biopsy results. Predictably, they found that waiting and uncertainty was correlated with higher cortisol levels. From the [...]

Pre-Paid Health Care

The front page of the Wall Street Journal got a little buzz yesterday from the health care community, medical bloggers and the pathology residency program directors among them. It profiled West Virginia primary care doc Vic Wood, who has reinvented his practice by offering “prepaid” services: For a monthly fee of $83 per individual or [...]

Lung Cancer Screening in the News

The National Cancer Institute has commissioned the National Lung Cancer Screening Trial, to the tune of 50,000 participants and $200 million. This huge and expensive trial comparing patients screened by CT scan with those screened by X-ray hopes to definitively answer the question of whether lung cancer screening is beneficial. The US Preventative Services Task [...]

Trouble With State Medical Examiners

Reason Magazine’s Radley Balko has an exposé (a shorter version has been published in the Wall Street Journal) on the broken medical examiner system in Mississippi, and, in particular, the troubling case of Dr. Stephen Hayne, an “entrepreneurial” pathologist who gives all forensic pathologists a bad name.   Hayne is the de facto state medical examiner for [...]