Today's Globe: healthcare hearing, Gupta as surgeon general, cell phones and surveys, family health history, Army slim camp, drug study disclosures, off-label drug use, Alan Hilgenberg
Governor Deval Patrick yesterday asked the state's most prominent hospital and health insurance leaders to take quick action to hold down rapidly rising healthcare costs, suggesting that if they did not take steps on their own, they might face new government regulation.
"At 39, Sanjay Gupta is an assistant professor at Emory University Medical School and associate chief of neurosurgery at Atlanta's Grady Memorial Hospital, a large full-service medical center that is also the city's public hospital," Peter S. Canellos writes in a National Perspective. "Those are fine credentials for a young doctor, but not enough by themselves to make him a national leader in medicine, let alone leading the short list for surgeon general."
The popularity of cellular telephones, an increasingly mobile population, rising expenses, flat budgets, and new insights into ways answers can differ depending on how a question is asked - all are conspiring to make health surveys more difficult.
Today, the government begins offering a free new service to help people compile a health history at home, e-mail it to relatives who can fill in the gaps, and even pop it into their doctors' computers.
The Army has been dismissing so many overweight applicants that its top recruiter, trying to keep troop numbers up in wartime, is considering starting a slim-down camp to transform chubby trainees into svelte soldiers.
Drug regulators haven't done enough to force disclosure of financial conflicts of interest among the researchers who conduct clinical trials of medications and medical devices, according to a government investigation.
Food and Drug Administration officials have finalized guidelines that make it easier for pharmaceutical companies to use medical journal articles to promote drugs for unapproved uses.
Dr. Alan Hilgenberg, an accomplished cardiac surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital who in the last 10 years had become nationally recognized in thoracic aortic surgery, died Dec. 25 of pancreatic cancer at MGH. The Boston resident was 64.
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blogger
Elizabeth Cooney is a former
health reporter for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, where she also was a
business reporter and an editor. Earlier in her career, she edited medical
books and journals at Little, Brown, and worked for Boston magazine.Boston Globe Health and Science staff:
- Gideon Gil, Health and Science Editor
- Ishani Ganguli, Short White Coat blogger
Appointing Sanjay Gupta as Surgeon General is like appointing "Judge Judy" to the Supreme Court. Dr. Gupta has few qualifications to be Surgeon General. He has openly rejected the view that American healthcare is in serious trouble; he has no experience in public health, public health policy or administration.
Dr Gupta is connected closely with the big Pharmaceutical companies and the insurance companies that have put us in the healthcare crisis we are in. He has too many conflicts of interest.
Obama should consider:
1. Howard Koh, MD MPH former Commissioner of Public Health in Massachusetts, now at the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Koh is a true advocate for health.
2. Marcia Angell, MD , former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, now in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.