- FREOPP: Switzerland leads the world in health care innovation.
- Misspending and fraud in pandemic relief may be as high as $400 billion. Can we get the money back?
- IRS: You can use your HSA, HRA or FSA to pay for a gym membership, so long as you doctor “prescribes” the membership, say, for weight loss.
- Biden supports “gender affirming” pediatric care.
- New and more rigorous study: Women who married had a 35% lower risk of death for any reason, lower risk of cardiovascular disease, less depression and loneliness; and they were happier and more optimistic, and had a greater sense of purpose and hope.
- EVT is creating radically better outcomes for stroke victims, but only a handful of hospitals offer it. Telemedicine helps. (NYT)
Category: Doctors & Hospitals
Can’t Find a Doctor Who Takes Medicare, Medicaid or Obamacare? Blame Congress (and the AMA)!
Imagine spending most of your life preparing to be a doctor. You get straight As in high school and college. You are accepted to medical school and four years later you graduate with a Doctor of Medicine degree. Your training is not over, however. Medical school graduates must go through a residency training program, which is a requirement to practice medicine in all 50 states. Not all medical graduates will be accepted into residency. In other words, the National Resident Matching Program (Match) is a game of musical chairs, where the losers lose not only their seat but often their career.
NY Times: AI Can Read Mammograms as Good or Better than Radiologists
There is a new artificial intelligence (AI) interface that’s been in the news lately called ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a language-based AI chatbot that can do many things humans can do. Some tasks it can do better than humans can do. A week or so ago I asked Would You See an AI Doctor?, Saying:
Radiologists sometimes use computer-aided detection (CAD) to interpret mammograms as a backup to human interpretation. Using both a radiologist and CAD together increases accuracy.
A few days later The New York Times reported on an ongoing test in Hungary, where AI is being used to assist in reading mammograms.
Inside a dark room at Bács-Kiskun County Hospital outside Budapest, Dr. Éva Ambrózay, a radiologist with more than two decades of experience, peered at a computer monitor showing a patient’s mammogram.
Friday Links
- An argument for mask wearing, even after the Cochrane Review meta-analysis.
- An early (and completely uncritical) history of medical licensing. To be paired with Regulation of Medical Care by moi — for balance.
- Why Daylight Savings Time matters: “The body releases sleep-time and wake-time hormones at a particular time.” Studies have shown that deadly car accidents, workplace injuries, and heart attacks increase following the springtime change.
- Should a face-to-face meeting be required before doctors prescribe a controlled substance for a patient?
- California to end Walgreens contract over abortion pills policy.
- What the Biden plan to “save” Medicare doesn’t do: repeal the Democrats’ IRA bill that takes $246 billion out of Medicare. (CBO p. 72)