The pandemic and the need to respond remain. “ending the emergency doesn’t mean that the world has fully addressed the problems that made this an emergency. Global vaccine distribution remains wildly inequitable, leaving many people susceptible to the virus’s worst effects; deaths are still concentrated among those most vulnerable; the virus’s evolutionary and transmission patterns are far from predictable or seasonal. Now, ending the emergency is less an epidemiological decision than a political one: Our tolerance for these dangers has grown to the extent that most people are doing their best to look away from the remaining risk, and will … Read More
As antibiotic resistance spreads, bacteriophages could help avert a crisis “Antibiotics are vital to modern medicine. [..] Life expectancy would drop by a third if they did not exist. But after decades of overuse their powers are fading. Some bacteria have evolved resistance, creating a growing army of “superbugs” against which there is no effective treatment. Antimicrobial resistance is expected to kill 10m people a year by 2050, up from around 1m in 2019. [..] Microbiologists have known for decades that disease-causing bacteria can suffer from illnesses of their own. They are susceptible to attack by bacteriophages (“phages” for short): … Read More
“the American Medical Informatics Association, with seed funding from the National Library of Medicine, formed a group under the moniker of 25 × 5 to reduce clinician documentation burden by three-quarters during the next 5 years. A workshop in 2022 allied with the 25 × 5 initiative identified 6 major EHR issues: Based on those discussions and our professional observations, 4 issues emerged as most salient and 3 as most actionable. The continued lack of nationally used unique personal safety identifiers for health as originally mandated in the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) in the mid-1990s presents a continuing threat to privacy, … Read More
“Abstract: Health insurance coverage in the United States is highly uncertain. In the post-Affordable Care Act (ACA), pre-COVID United States, we estimate that while 12.5% of individuals under 65 are uninsured at a point in time, twice as many—one in four—are uninsured at some point over a 2-y period. Moreover, the risk of losing insurance remained virtually unchanged with the introduction of the landmark ACA. Risk of insurance loss is particularly high for those with health insurance through Medicaid or private exchanges; they have a 20% chance of losing coverage at some point over a 2-y period, compared to 8.5% … Read More
“Tens of millions of Americans are suffering pain. But chronic pain is not just a result of car accidents and workplace injuries but is also linked to troubled childhoods, loneliness, job insecurity and a hundred other pressures on working families. [..] [..] cluster of tightly woven problems that hold back our people and our country: childhood trauma, educational failure, addiction, mental health issues, homelessness, loneliness, family breakdown, unemployment — and, we increasingly recognize, physical pain. “People’s lives are coming apart, and this leads to huge increases in physical pain,” said Angus Deaton, a Nobel Prize winner in economics who with … Read More
“More than five decades after the introduction of CABG and four decades after the introduction of PCI into clinical practice, the procedural and long-term outcomes of the two revascularisation methods are now well characterised. Although technological improvements will continue to increase their safety and efficacy, the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two interventions will probably remain substantially unchanged. A limitation of available data is that they are from prevalently young, White, male, HIC [high-income countries] populations. The results of coronary revascularisation in women, non-White racial and ethnic groups, older adults, and LMICs [low- and middle-income countries] require further and … Read More
“A new Washington state law will require companies to receive a user’s explicit consent before they can collect, share, or sell their health data. Washington Governor Jay Inslee signed the My Health, My Data bill into law on Thursday, giving users the right to withdraw consent at any time and have their data deleted. The law should help shield users’ health data from the companies and organizations not included under the HIPAA Privacy Rule, which prevents certain medical providers from disclosing “individually identifiable” health information without consent. The HIPAA Privacy Rule doesn’t cover many of the health apps and sites that collect medical data, … Read More
“Large language models (LLMs) are a type of deep learning model that are trained on vast amounts of text data with the goal of generating new text that closely resembles human responses. The release of ChatGPT (OpenAI, San Francisco, CA, USA), an LLM-based chatbot, on Nov 30, 2022, propelled LLMs to the forefront of public attention and made them accessible to millions of people to experiment with. Since then, medical practitioners and researchers have been exploring potential applications of LLMs, as much of medical practice and research revolve around large text-based tasks, such as presentations, publications, documentation, and reporting. [..] Ethical … Read More
“Psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca, and Ecstasy, along with anesthetics such as ketamine, can enhance a user’s neuroplasticity within hours of administration. In fact, some users take psychedelics for the express purpose of making their brain a little more malleable. Just drop some acid, the thinking goes, and your brain will rewire itself—you’ll be smarter, fitter, more creative, and self-aware. You might even get a transcendent experience. Popular media abound with anecdotes suggesting that microdosing LSD or psilocybin can expand divergent thinking, a more free and associative type of thinking that some psychologists link with creativity. Research suggests … Read More
“Some patient messages are unsolicited questions seeking medical advice, which also take more skill and time to answer than generic messages (eg, scheduling an appointment, accessing test results). Current approaches to decreasing these message burdens include limiting notifications, billing for responses, or delegating responses to less trained support staff. Unfortunately, these strategies can limit access to high-quality health care. For instance, when patients were told they might be billed for messaging, they sent fewer messages and had shorter back-and-forth exchanges with clinicians. Artificial intelligence (AI) assistants are an unexplored resource for addressing the burden of messages. While some proprietary AI assistants show … Read More