The Wall Street Journal (11/10, Dalton) reports that some countries' governments have stopped focusing on individual discipline to combat obesity, and instead are working to make entire communities more healthy by reducing the opportunities to live unhealthily. Laura Kettel Khan, an obesity expert at the CDC, says that "people are finally acknowledging that the obesity problem is so pervasive that it isn't just because people are making bad choices." The Journal describes obesity programs across Europe and in the US, noting that these initiatives are taking off because obesity has become too expensive a problem to handle on an individual basis.
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A study performed at The University of Rochester Medical School showed that when adolescents graduate to young adulthood, their preventive care tends to fall by the wayside. A recent study has found that young adults are much less likely to use ambulatory or preventive care, even though their mortality rate is more than twice that of adolescents. COMMENT: I have difficulty understanding why this should surprise anyone when the various insurance programs, including Medicaid fail to pay for counseling by primary care practitioners. Further once the individual reaches 18 years of age eligibility for Medicaid vanishes.
Have you puzzled over the “helpful” advice printed out with each prescription? If so you are not alone. A recent study by the FDA found that the printed consumer medication information (CMI) voluntarily provided with new prescriptions by retail pharmacies does not consistently provide easy-to-read, understandable information about the use and risks of medications. Only about 75 percent of this information met the minimum criteria for usefulness as defined by a panel of stakeholders. In 1996, Congress called for 95 percent of all new prescriptions to be accompanied by useful CMI by 2006. Shouldn’t 10 years have been ;long enough? In 2009 the FDA will hold a public meeting to discuss the study's findings. In addition, the FDA has created a Web site to receive public comment on the study and solicit feedback on the best ways to provide useful prescription information to consumers.
Don' t trust what you read in the news media. In PLoS Medicine Gary Schwitzer reviews 500 stories published by major media. Among his conclusions were that:
The daily delivery of news stories about new treatments, tests, products, and procedures may have a profound—and perhaps harmful—impact on health care consumers.
That journalists usually fail to discuss costs, the quality of the evidence, the existence of alternative options, and the absolute magnitude of potential benefits and harms.
As a result even careful reading of news stories, without examining the source of the data may be harmful to readers, and those they care for. The internet will usually provide links to the original research where the reader can look for the quality of the data.
Physicians who score poorly on patient-physician communication skills exams are far more likely to generate patient complaints to regulatory authorities, says a new study led by McGill University’s Robyn Tamblyn and published in the September 5 issue of JAMA. Tamblyn’s team followed 3,424 physicians licensed to practice in Ontario and Quebec who took the Medical Council of Canada clinical skills examination between 1993 and 1996. They discovered a very strong relationship between those who scored poorly and later complaints by patients. There is no reason to suppose the same situation does not prevail in the U.S.
FDA today announced two new initiatives to enhance online communications. A Web page, "Consumer Health Information for You and Your Family, provides comprehensive and timely consumer information. A free monthly e-newsletter, FDA Consumer Health Information, will alert consumers to content contained on the page.
