Friday, September 14, 2007

Today's Globe: drug abuse by prescription, cooling after injury, SF healthcare for all, stents, Dr. Donald Dressler, Dr. James Longcope

The case of Dr. Joseph Zolot (left), whose license was suspended in June, opens a window into the potential for highly profitable assembly-line prescribing, as the medical profession has become more aggressive in treating chronic pain, including putting suffering patients on narcotics.

Doctors initially said that Buffalo Bills tight end Kevin Everett (left) had little chance of walking again after his devastating spinal cord injury in last Sunday's football game against the Denver Broncos. But Everett's ongoing recovery may stem in part from an experimental cooling technique performed moments after the accident, researchers say.

An initiative known as Healthy San Francisco is the first effort by a municipality to guarantee care to all of its uninsured, and it represents the latest attempt by state and local governments to patch a broken federal system.

Patients who get the leading drug-coated stents to prop open coronary arteries rather than bare-metal stents run no higher risk of death, according to a new report by a multinational team of doctors.

Dr. Donald P. Dressler (left), a physician who specialized in the treatment of burns, died of prostate cancer Sept. 5 at his home in Portsmouth, R.I. He practiced in Cambridge for many years, taught at Harvard Medical School, and was the city's acting commissioner of health and hospitals in 1978 and 1979.

Assuaging the mental burden each person carries was a calling Dr. James Longcope (left) first heard in the 1960s when, as a Navy officer and a general practitioner, he treated those who served in Vietnam and their families in the United States. He changed his specialty to psychiatry and spent 37 years seeing patients in the Emerson Hospital community. He died of a heart attack Sept. 3 in the cottage he shared with his wife in Cedar Bay, Ontario, along Lake Erie in Canada. He was 70 and had moved to Westminster last year after living for many years in Groton, Harvard, and Acton.

Posted by Elizabeth Cooney at 06:58 AM

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