According to one study, recognizing drug approvals by regulatory bodies in Canada and Europe between 2000 and 2010 would have given U.S. consumers quicker access to 37 “novel” drugs for which “no other FDA‐approved prescription medicine had the same mechanism of action,” including 10 drugs treating mostly orphan diseases “for which no alternative therapy was available in the USA.” Such recognition would have allowed U.S. consumers to access those drugs a median of 13.6 months earlier.
Category: Consumer-Driven Health Care
Internships Boost Health Care Workers in Rural CO
I grew up in a small town in the middle of nowhere. My parents house was 19 miles East of the Colorado border. The adjacent Colorado counties were so sparsely populated that the ranches were open range. There were no fences. The local hospital where I got my tonsils removed only had 9 beds. The hospital is county-owned, as is the long-term care facility. Some of the local health care providers are subsidized by the county, with free office space and guaranteed incomes. Otherwise, the only health care providers would be miles away in other counties.
Friday Links
- Is Obamacare’s requirement that preventive services be provided with no patient cost sharing unconstitutional?
- New York Times: Older doctors should be given competency exams. One-third of US doctors are 60 years of age or older.
- Have nurse’s license, will travel: The average weekly rate for travel nurses is $3,080 — about $700 less than it was a year ago.
- Since its founding in 1973, the DEA has intercepted a fraction of one percent of illicit drug trades.
- Physicians want to protect their guild from proposals to let nurses do what they are trained and qualified to do.
- Cato paper: “Medical decisionmaking is increasingly under the purview of law enforcement. Practitioners and patients alike are often prejudged as criminals.”
FDA Approves Fecal Transplants as though it were a Drug
Clostridium difficile infections (CDI) are difficult to treat and can be deadly. CDI is an infection of the gut when the gut bacteria are thrown out of balance and populated with Clostridium difficile rather than a healthy biome. The standard treatment is antibiotics, which can also wreck beneficial gut biome. CDI often is recurrent, coming back time and time again.