Blog posts on health care

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• Examining the Scientific Basis Around Exercise and Diet Claims

  As I have said before, scientific literacy is critical to allow us to make those judgements about what is credible evidence and what are outright lies, foolish claims or highly suspicious claims tainted by conflicts of interest.

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• Data on Medical Errors

  When there are headlines like 100,000 deaths due to medical error every year that reads to me like John was walking along the street and boom a medical-error/piano dropped on his head and killed him. But I don't believe that is true. I bet it is true that are lots of deaths due to just unforgivable errors - someone is given a drug which was indicated in numerous sensible ways would kill them due an allergy but they were given it anyway and died.
  
  But I don't trust how much of the deaths attributed to error are due nearly entirely to error versus those due nearly entirely to the underlying health and while there was an error it is unclear it really made much of difference at all (yes the person died, but they were going to without the error also).

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• How Healthy Is Squid for Us?

  I try to eat healthfully, especially when I can tweak what I eat to gain a health advantage. I know fish have good qualities. I live in Malaysia now and squid (called sotong here) is often available. I often prefer squid to fish here as the fish use here are often fairly small with bones to deal and not much meat for the effort (it is great sometimes but I am often lazy).

  This is what I found out about squid...

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• A Healthy Lifestyle is More About Health Care than the Sickness Management That We Call Health Care Is

  It really is important for giving yourself the best chance for health by taking sensible steps to exercise based on your own situation

  ...

  Doing small things like using a treadmill while you watch TV or taking the stairs instead of the elevator for short trips can help. Another option is to walk instead of driving your car, or if you drive parking a few blocks away (or at the far side of the parking lot) walking, or if you are running several errands walk between those that you can even if you are using your car. Biking to work is another healthy lifestyle choice (if you city has made this safe – too often they fail to do sensible things).

   

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• Patient Centered Doesn't Mean Patient Directed

  We need to have systems that are patient focused but that doesn’t mean patients dictate treatment. And we need to see a much wider system than we normally do. We need to be focused on healthy living not just disease treatment. And given the mess that is the USA health care system we need to focus on reducing the burden of coping with the horrible USA health system bureaucracy - that system does great damage to those having to deal with it (and it is nearly all waste that shouldn't be creating such hardship).

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• Medical Tourism

  Medical tourism (traveling overseas to get medical care) is growing and likely to continue to do so. The USA’s extremely high costs of medical care push people to find more reasonable health care solutions. Also in some countries the very rich seek out advanced treatments outside their country.

  Seeking more cost effective and more customer focused health care options are likely to lead to booming markets in catering to these customers. Many countries have seen this as a smart market to focus on. And I think they are right.

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• USA Health Care Spending 2013: $2.9 trillion $9,255 per person and 17.4% of GDP

  The slow down in how badly the health care system has performed in the USA has resulted in the share of GDP taken by the health care system finally stabilizing. Health care spending has remained near 17.4% since 2009. While hardly great news, this is much better news than we have had in the last 30 years from the USA health care system. The percentage of GDP taken by the USA health care system is double what other rich countries spend with no better health results.

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• We Have Thousands of Viruses In Us All the Time

  Biology and the amazing interactions within a human body are amazing. Our bodies are teeming with other life (and almost life – viruses). All these microbes have a drastic impact on our health and those impacts are not always bad.

  The human microbiome is incredible and teams with thousands of species (bacteria, viruses, members of domain Archaea, yeasts, single-celled eukaryotes, helminth parasites and bacteriophages). The complexity of interactions between all the elements of what is in our bodies and cells is one of the things that makes health care so challenging...

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• Scientific Inquiry Leads to Using Fluoride for Healthy Teeth

  I love stories of how we learn for observing what is happening. We don’t always need to innovate by thinking up creative new ideas. If we are observant we can pick up anomalies and then examine the situation to find possible explanations and then experiment to see if those explanations prove true.

  When working this way we often are seeing correlation and then trying to figure out which part of the correlation is an actual cause. So in this dental example, a dentist noticed his patients had bad brown stains on their teeth than others populations did...

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• Exercise Is Really Really Good for You

  150 minutes a week of moderate (walking briskly, biking, even mowing the lawn maybe) activity (30 minutes a day 5 days a week) is a decent target for a minimum amount of activity for most people.

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• 200,000 People Die Every Year in Europe from Adverse Drug Effects – How Can We Improve?

  I think interactions is a hugely important area that needs a great deal more research. Doing so is very complex, which means it isn’t surprising so much more work is needed. The work of my father (and George Box and others) on multi-factorial experimentation is a powerful tool to aid this work (and that connection is likely one of the reasons I find the area of interactions so interesting – along with the realization there is so much benefit possible if we focus in that area more). Previous post on this Curious Cat Science and Engineering blog: Introduction to Fractional Factorial Designed Experiments.

  The human and financial costs of adverse effects are very high. That is why the discovery of new medicines is increasingly focused more on predicting possible adverse effects at the initial stages of developing a new drug.

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• Decades Later The USA Health Care System is Still a Deadly Disease for Our Economy

  Health care is extremely expensive everywhere. But in the USA the health care system is twice as costly as other rich countries. This is an enormous burden on the USA economy. Nothing else comes close to being as costly in terms of direct spending. And there a a great deal of other damage done that can’t be seen in just the 100% more the USA spends on health care than other rich countries spend. And the health outcomes are no better for the extra hundres of billions of dollars spent every year for health care in the USA.

  The costs of decades of failure are extrodinary.

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• Health Insurance Considerations for Digital Nomads

  Health insurance is something that many young healthy people don’t think about. And many digital nomads are young healthy people, though not all of them are. And if you are from most rich countries you may not think about health insurance as your country makes it pretty easy to just be treated if you have health care needs, without a need to have bought health insurance.

  But when you are traveling outside your country health insurance is important...

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• USA Health Care Crisis: Opioid Abuse

  Opioid abuse has greatly increased these deaths in the last decade. Chronic pain is a real problem we need to manage. But the current practices are leading to troubling results as are our methods for dealing with drug abuse (including illegal drugs such as heroin). Abusing prescription drugs such as addictive opioids and illegal drugs such as heroin are both leading to an increasing number of deaths in the USA in the last decade.

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• Healthy Living Greatly Reduces Likelihood of Dying from Cancer

  Lifestyle choices can greatly reduce the incidence and death rates from cancer. 4 factors can reduce the incidence of cancer by up to 40% and death rate by 50%: don’t smoke, don’t drink alcohol in excess, maintain a BMI between 18.5 and 27.5, and exercising at a moderate intensity for at least 150 minutes or at a vigorous intensity for at least 75 minutes every week.

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