Another
reason to stay healthy, to eat healthy, to invest in your health with quality
supplements... things are going from bad to worse in the
hospitals these days!
Sponge left in after surgery? Medicare won't pay
Agency will no longer cover hospital errors and preventable problems
Updated: 1:54 p.m. PT Aug 19, 2007
WASHINGTON -
Medicare will stop paying the costs of treating infections, falls,
objects left in a patient during surgery; blood
incompatibility; air embolism; falls; mediastinitis, which is an
infection after heart surgery; urinary
tract infections from
using catheters; pressure ulcers, or bed sores; and vascular
infections from using catheters and
other things that happen in hospitals that could have been prevented.
Since
the hospital, who's incentive is always to improve their bottom line,
will have to discover, report and pay for their own mistakes leaving
the Patient at their mercy. This may apply to mistakes your own doctor
makes at his practice! Imagine getting a serious infection after a
visit or procedure and having to argue with the doctor or hospital
administrator who's fault it is...? If you become a Patient in a
hospital, good luck!
By The
Way
Painkiller use rising at alarming rate
Report: Sales of drugs like Oxycontin jumped 90 percent from 1997-2005
Updated: 6:34 a.m. PT Aug 20, 2007
MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. -
People in the United States are living in a world of pain and they are
popping pills at an alarming rate to cope with it. The amount of five
major painkillers sold at retail establishments rose 90 percent
between 1997 and 2005, according to an Associated Press analysis of
statistics from the Drug Enforcement Administration. More than 200,000
pounds of codeine, morphine, oxycodone, hydrocodone and meperidine
were purchased at retail stores during the most recent year
represented in the data. That total is enough to give more than 300
milligrams of painkillers to every person in the country.
Diabetes drugs to get 'black box' warning
FDA to require notice of heart failure risks on labels of Avandia, Actos
Updated: 5:48 a.m. PT June 7, 2007
WASHINGTON - The Food
and Drug Administration will require tougher warnings about heart
failure on the diabetes drugs Avandia and Actos, FDA Commissioner
Andrew von Eschenbach said at a congressional hearing Wednesday. The
concerns about Avandia prompted some Democratic lawmakers to rebuke
the Food and Drug Administration and call for increased regulation of
the pharmaceutical industry.
Study tracks huge growth in drug advertising
Regulators doing less as pharmaceutical companies boost spending
Updated: 2:50 p.m. PT Aug 15, 2007
Ten years after a rule change allowed drug companies to advertise directly to U.S. consumers, the overall amount spent promoting medicines is 2.6 times what it was in 1996, researchers said on Wednesday. But direct-to-consumer advertising, which increased by 330 percent during that period, still only makes up 14 percent of the nearly $30 billion the companies spend to promote their drugs, according to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The “Ask your doctor
about” commercials, which sometimes do not even say what a drug is
for, have been widely derided and cited as one reason health
care costs are rising faster than general
inflation.
