US News ranks med schools
Excerpts from the Globe's blog on the area's medical community.
Harvard Medical School is again the top medical school in the United States, according to annual rankings compiled by US News & World Report. Harvard has led the rankings since 1990, when they began. Boston University ranked 34th, Tufts University was 47th, and the University of Massachusetts came in 49th out of 125 US medical schools.
ELIZABETH COONEY
Egg donation debate
The debate about paying women for donating eggs to stem cell research is wrong headed, according to Debora Spar, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Instead of worrying about how much a woman is paid -- sometimes up to $50,000 -- we should be concerned about the health risks of donating such eggs.
Writing in the current issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, she asks whether women can give fully informed consent when there are few long-term studies of the drugs they are given to stimulate egg production and no federal guidelines governing egg donation or collecting data about it.
ELIZABETH COONEY
No blanket insurance waivers
Massachusetts House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi made his position clear last week on the issue of blanket waivers of penalties for people who can't afford health insurance: No dice.
DiMasi, one of the architects of the state's universal health insurance law, was addressing the next big issue to come before the board overseeing implementation of the law. "I think we should have a determination on a case by case basis," he told reporters.
The law requires every adult in Massachusetts to have insurance by July 1 or pay a penalty in 2008 unless insurance is unaffordable. The law gives the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector the authority to define what affordable means, and the board is scheduled to debate that next month.
ALICE DEMBNER and LISA WANGSNESS
Aspirin and women
Women who took low doses of aspirin had a lower risk of death from all causes, but particularly heart disease and cancer, Harvard researchers reported in Archives of Internal Medicine.
But it's still too soon to recommend aspirin for the general prevention of disease, the lead author said.
"Women should not take this study, or any study, thus far as a license to take aspirin without any supervision," Dr. Andrew T. Chan of Massachusetts General Hospital said. "Women need to discuss with their physicians whether it makes sense for them, get a sense of what their risk is for cancer or cardiovascular disease, and strategize with them how to prevent the risk of disease through other means."
ELIZABETH COONEY
Not a great place to be a doctor
Massachusetts continues to decline as a place to practice medicine, the Massachusetts Medical Society reported last week. The deteriorating environment has led to a shortage of physicians and reduced access to care as the state implements its new healthcare law, the group warns.
The findings are based on an index the society compiles about the overall climate for physicians, including such measures as liability costs and the number of employment ads in the New England Journal of Medicine. It's the 13th straight year of decline.
Low reimbursements for services, administrative hurdles such as pre-authorizations for imaging tests and prescription drugs, and increasing costs were cited as problems local doctors face.
ELIZABETH COONEY 