Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Today's Globe: health program for poor, campus hunger strikes, diabetes deaths, bipolar diagnosis in children

Iris M. Santiago and Robert Abreu looked over
snack food content ingredients at the Holyoke
Health Center, part of the CenterCare program.
(Nancy Palmieri for the Boston Globe)

CenterCare, a program that has improved the health of low-income patients with chronic illnesses, faces deep funding cuts in the pending state budget, even though top state officials touted similar disease management strategies just a month ago as a crucial way to improve healthcare quality and cut costs.

Students on at least five campuses went on hunger strikes this year, most of them protesting what they saw as their university's involvement in unfair treatment of workers. In most of the protests, the hunger strikers claimed to have won concessions at the end (including Harvard, left). But they have also alarmed university leaders and, on some campuses, triggered a backlash from fellow students.

The death rate for men with diabetes has fallen sharply in the United States since the early 1970s even as more people develop the disease, but women are not making the same progress, researchers said yesterday.

Dr. Joseph Biederman and his colleagues at Harvard are the professionals most responsible for developing and promoting the standards of care in the Rebecca Riley case -- which include diagnosing preschool children as young as 2 with bipolar disorder and treating them with multiple medications, Dr. Lawrence Diller writes on the op-ed page. He practices behavioral/developmental pediatrics in Walnut Creek, Calif., and is the author of "The Last Normal Child: Essays on the Intersection of Kids, Culture and Psychiatric Drugs."

Posted by Elizabeth Cooney at 06:27 AM

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