JAMA
lborkowski | July 18, 2016In a Special Communication published in JAMA, President Obama assesses the Affordable Care Act's progress and recommends additional steps for elected officials to take to improve US healthcare. He notes that when he took office, more than 1 in 7 Americans lacked insurance coverage. Since the ACA's adoption, the uninsured rate has declined by 43%. Having 29 million people uninsured in this country is still shameful, but it's a big improvement over the 49 million uninsured in 2010.
In addition to reducing uninsurance, Obama notes, "The law has also greatly improved health insurance coverage for…
gregladen | September 14, 2015According to the Japan Meteorological Agency, "The monthly anomaly of the global average surface temperature in August 2015 (i.e. the average of the near-surface air temperature over land and the SST) was +0.45°C above the 1981-2010 average (+0.79°C above the 20th century average), and was the warmest since 1891. On a longer time scale, global average surface temperatures have risen at a rate of about 0.65°C per century."
See graphic above.
oracknows | July 18, 2014
Of all the alternative medical systems out there, chiropractic is one of the oddest. Unlike many of the others, it has a modicum of plausibility, at least for back problems due to musculoskeletal strains. After all, the science-based specialty of physical therapy uses spinal manipulation to treat back problems. Of course, the big difference between chiropractic and physical therapy is that chiropractic is based on a delusion, namely the concept of subluxations. To science-based specialties, a subluxation a painful partial dislocation. This is different from a chiropractic subluxation,…
mmckenna | June 15, 2010Via the Journal of the American Medical Association, a report from Spain: the first recorded outbreak, in a Madrid hospital, of Staphylococcus aureus resistant to linezolid (Zyvox), one of only a few drugs still available to treat very serious infections of drug-resistant staph, MRSA. This is bad news.
Background: The M in MRSA stands for methicillin, the first of the semi-synthetic penicillins, created by Beecham Laboratories in 1960 in response to a worldwide 1950s outbreak of penicillin-resistant staph. The central feature of the chemical structure of both penicillin and methicillin is an…
tlambert | March 8, 2010JAMA/Archives has issued a special notice:
SPECIAL NOTICE: The embargo on the Archives of Internal Medicine paper (see below) was broken by Jonathan Leake of The Sunday Times of London. In response to this violation, reporters and editors at The Sunday Times will no longer have pre- or post-embargo access to any JAMA/Archives materials.
I think, perhaps, that other journals should preemptively ban The Sunday Times. I'm not going to link to Leake's story -- the BBC story on the study is here.
ddobbs | October 14, 2009"The Brite Nightgown," from Donald Fagen's First And Only Solo Tour (2006) -
Dana Blankenhorn, who brings a distinctive mix of skepticism, intelligence, and gruff impatience to his flu coverage, digests some unsettling stats from the JAMA articles. Some of his highlights:
* Health care workers get little protection from fancy masks. Workers given ordinary medical masks had a nearly 1 in 4 chance of getting the disease. The same for those given fancy N95 fitted masks. Many medical workers have been resisting getting the shot.
* Hospitals must be prepared for extraordinary burdens in the…
oracknows | March 29, 2009Last week, there was a bit of a scandal of sorts over an editorial published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), which I blogged about in a rather long post. The short version is that a flawed study that tested using Lexapro that neglected to report a rather important comparison that would have changed the conclusion to finding no difference between cognitive therapy and Lexapro in relieving the symptoms of depression after a stroke resulted in a complaint by Dr. Jonathan Leo of Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, TN. Dr. Leo wrote a letter pointing inquiring…
palmd | March 24, 2009The current insanity at JAMA has been well reported elsewhere (also see these links: here, here, here, and here). I'll give you a thumbnail sketch. A professor from a small university wrote to JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) to let them know that an author of an antidepressant study appeared to have an undisclosed conflict of interest (COI). When he didn't hear back from JAMA he wrote to a more prestigious journal, the British Journal of Medicine (BMJ) who published his letter. This caused the editors at JAMA to completely lose their shit, threatening the letter…
oracknows | March 24, 2009About a month and a half ago, I happened to be fortunate enough to be able to swing the time to attend a symposium in which Brian Deer (whom anyone reading this blog lately is well familiar with) spoke. It was an opportune time, coming as it did around the time when he had just published his new blockbuster story about how Andrew Wakefield, architect of the MMR vaccine scare in the U.K., had apparently falsified data for his infamous 1998 Lancet paper that started it all. The symposium was entitled Science, the Media and Responsibility for Child Health: Lessons Learned from the MMR Vaccine,…