Saturday, August 17, 2013
When No One Is on Call - NYTimes.com
We nurses all have stories — if we're lucky, it's just one — about the time we failed a patient. It's usually a problem of being too busy: too many cases, too many procedures to keep track of until one critical step, just one, slips through our frenetic fingers and someone gets hurt.
I saw it happen the first time while in nursing school. A patient needed an escalating dose of pain medicine. Her pain eased, but her breathing slowed and her oxygen level dropped. I told her nurse that the patient might need narcan, a reversing agent for opioids.
"Narcan?" The nurse didn't have time for that. Caring for eight patients on a busy medical-surgery floor meant that getting through the day's tasks took up all her time. Half an hour later, though, the patient needed an emergency team to revive her. I held her hand while an anesthesiologist stuck a tube down her throat. She ended up in intensive care.
It would be easy to blame the nurse. How could she be too busy? But she was a good nurse, smart and committed. She simply had too much to do, too many acute needs to address. And then one, just one, got out of control.
Bedside nurses are the hospital's front line, but we can't do the first-alert part of our jobs if there aren't enough of us on the floor. More demands for paperwork, along with increasing complexity of care, means the amount of time any one nurse has for all her patients is diminishing. And as hospitals face increasing financial pressure, nurse staffing often takes a hit, because nurses make up the biggest portion of any hospital's labor costs.
For patients, though, the moral calculus of the nurses-for-money exchange doesn't add up. Pioneering work done by Linda H. Aiken at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002 showed that each extra patient a nurse had above an established nurse-patient ratio made it 7 percent more likely that one of the patients would die. She found that 20,000 people died a year because they were in hospitals with overworked nurses.
Research also shows that when floors are adequately staffed with bedside nurses, the number of patients injured by falls declines. Staff increases lead to decreases in hospital-acquired infections, which kill 100,000 patients every year.
The importance of sufficient nurse staffing is becoming irrefutable, so much so that the Registered Nurse Safe-Staffing Act of 2013 was recently introduced by Representatives Lois Capps, a Democrat from California and a nurse, and David Joyce, a Republican from Ohio.
Among other things, the act would require that hospitals include their nurse staffing levels on Medicare's Hospital Compare Web site and post their staffing levels in a visible place in every hospital.
Concerns over money will determine whether this bill has even a chance at passing. It is collecting co-sponsors, but similar legislation has never gotten very far because hospital administrators view such mandates as too costly.
It's hard to do a definitive cost-benefit analysis of a variable as complicated as nurse staffing because health care accounting systems are often byzantine. But data suggest that sufficient staffing can significantly reduce hospital costs.
Medicare won't reimburse a hospital if a patient is readmitted before 30 days, and a full nursing staff is one way to reduce readmissions. Having enough nurses increases patient-satisfaction scores, which also helps maintain Medicare reimbursement levels. Understaffing leads to burnout and nurses' quitting their jobs, both of which cost money in terms of absenteeism and training new staff. Finally, falls and infections have associated costs.
What this discussion of finances misses, though, is that having enough nurses is not just about dollars and cents. It's about limiting the suffering of human beings. When hospitals have insufficient nursing staffs, patients who would have gotten better can get hurt, or worse.
Several months ago I started a new job, and a few weeks in I heard my name being called. A patient getting a drug that can cause dangerous reactions was struggling to breathe. I hurried to her room, only to discover that I wasn't needed. The other nurses from the floor were already there, stopping the infusion, checking the patient's oxygen and drawing up the rescue medication.
The patient was rattled, but there were enough nurses to respond, and in the end she was completely fine.
Now picture the same events in a different hospital, one that doesn't adequately staff, and this time the patient is you. As the drug drips in, you feel a malaise. You breathe deeply but can't quite get enough air. Your thinking becomes confused, your heart races. Terrified, you press the call light, you yell for help, but the too few nurses on the floor are spread thin and no one comes to help in time. A routine infusion ends with a call to a rapid-response team, a stay in intensive care, intubation, ventilation, death.
This kind of breakdown is not the nurses' fault, but the system's. We are not an elastic resource. We can be where we are needed, but only if there are enough of us.
Theresa Brown is an oncology nurse and the author of "Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, and Everything in Between."
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/when-no-one-is-on-call/?src=rechp
Friday, August 16, 2013
A Powerful Tool in the Doctor's Toolkit - NYTimes.com
It was well past midnight and most of the patients had settled in. The hospital ward was quiet, except for "the howler."
The howler was a patient in his 30s who earned his nickname for his nightly bouts of yelling. This was in the early 1990s, during the peak of the AIDS epidemic. I was a second-year medical resident at Bellevue Hospital, in charge of the sprawling AIDS ward that night. Admissions were rolling in, one after another, each more feverish and emaciated than the previous.
This patient was already receiving hefty doses of pain medication, yet he kept screaming to the nurses about his pain. This went on, night after night, despite extensive medical evaluations to see if there were any missed explanations for his pain.
Nothing seemed to help, and the nightly yowling was agitating the other patients and driving the nursing staff to distraction. The head nurse paged me at 3 a.m. "You have to do something," she said.
I went to the patient's room. It was my fourth visit of the night, and the patient and I were both pretty exasperated with each other. He was sullen and cranky; I was exhausted and at my wits' end.
I pulled out a syringe and carefully drew up one c.c. of plain saline. "You know about Tylenol," I said, showing him the liquid-filled syringe. "You've heard of Tylenol #3. There's even a Tylenol #4. This" — and here I paused for dramatic effect— "this is Tylenol #5."
The patient stopped howling and gave me an interested look. Then he lowered his pajamas and allowed me to inject his gluteus maximus. Afterward, I pulled up a chair to his bedside and we waited together, allowing the minutes to tick unhurriedly by.
After what seemed like a mutually agreeable time, I stood up and bid him goodnight. The patient put his head to the pillow and promptly fell asleep. The ward was silent for the rest of the night.
I felt terribly guilty that I had committed an outright deception with this patient — something that is a true no-no. But on the other hand, it was the first night he got a full night of sleep, to say nothing of all the other patients on the ward and the rest of the staff.
When I related this story to Dr. Ted J. Kaptchuk, director of the program in placebo studies at Harvard, he gave a sigh of recognition. "We all have our moments of desperation," he said. "Usually around midnight."
Dr. Kaptchuk does not condone deception, but his research bears out that how caregivers present and administer treatments has a powerful effect on clinical outcomes.
Patients, for example, who received pain medicine directly from a doctor achieved better pain relief than patients who unknowingly received the same medicine, even at higher doses, automatically in their IVs. The rituals the doctor performs — drawing up the medication, visibly injecting it into the IV, discussing expected benefits — not to mention the attention and caring that comes with the presence of an actual human being — effected as much pain relief as doubling the dose of the medicine.
Placebos used to be thought of as psychological mumbo-jumbo more akin to hypnotism than real medicine. The biological breakthrough came in 1978, when researchers showed that not only was the placebo effect real, but that it could be reversed by administering naloxone — the chemical that blocks our endorphins, our natural painkillers.
Suddenly there was a plausible pharmacological mechanism for how placebos work and research in the field flowered. In June, Harvard Medical School and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation held an international medical conference devoted entirely to placebo science.
Dr. Kaptchuk describes placebos as not just the traditional sugar pill, but also "everything that surrounds a medical treatment": how caregivers describe the medication, how they administer it, the expectations they have for the medicine, their tone of voice, their strength of eye contact. In short, everything that doctors and nurses do in an interaction with a patient.
This is not especially surprising. Healers and shamans have known intuitively about the importance of this interaction since the dawn of time. Before we had developed treatments that could significantly impact the pathology of disease — antibiotics, chemotherapy, stents, organ transplants, transfusions — the "everything else" was the mainstay of medical care.
Doctors and nurses always feel a bit uneasy when it comes to placebos. Somehow it seems wrong, unethical, deceptive. But patients, it turns out, seem to be more flexible in their thinking. Studies have shown symptom relief even when patients are told they are getting a placebo; many patients are quite amenable to such "open-label" placebos. "If it gets rid of the pain," a patient once told me, "I don't care if it's a dill pickle!"
The ethics are evolving, but the general consensus is that transparency is the bottom line. What I did as a young — and desperate — resident wouldn't pass muster, because I deceived my patient about the medication. But if I'd told him that it was inert saline and if he was amenable to trying it, it could have been a reasonable treatment option. And it still might have helped him, especially if we had been able to have a detailed and compassionate conversation about his pain.
Dr. Kaptchuk thinks of placebo effects as just one of the many things in the toolkit of medicine. It would never be a substitute for appropriate medical care, but it is something that can enhance medical care greatly. Wise doctors and nurses already do this. They've found, usually just by personal experience, that their "everything else" — respect, attention, comfort, empathy, touch — often does the lion's share of medical care, no deception required. Sometimes the prescription is just the afterthought.
Danielle Ofri's newest book is "What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine." She is an associate professor of medicine at NYU School of Medicine and has cared for patients at Bellevue Hospital for more than 20 years. She is editor in chief of the Bellevue Literary Review.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/15/a-powerful-tool-in-the-doctors-toolkit/
The howler was a patient in his 30s who earned his nickname for his nightly bouts of yelling. This was in the early 1990s, during the peak of the AIDS epidemic. I was a second-year medical resident at Bellevue Hospital, in charge of the sprawling AIDS ward that night. Admissions were rolling in, one after another, each more feverish and emaciated than the previous.
This patient was already receiving hefty doses of pain medication, yet he kept screaming to the nurses about his pain. This went on, night after night, despite extensive medical evaluations to see if there were any missed explanations for his pain.
Nothing seemed to help, and the nightly yowling was agitating the other patients and driving the nursing staff to distraction. The head nurse paged me at 3 a.m. "You have to do something," she said.
I went to the patient's room. It was my fourth visit of the night, and the patient and I were both pretty exasperated with each other. He was sullen and cranky; I was exhausted and at my wits' end.
I pulled out a syringe and carefully drew up one c.c. of plain saline. "You know about Tylenol," I said, showing him the liquid-filled syringe. "You've heard of Tylenol #3. There's even a Tylenol #4. This" — and here I paused for dramatic effect— "this is Tylenol #5."
The patient stopped howling and gave me an interested look. Then he lowered his pajamas and allowed me to inject his gluteus maximus. Afterward, I pulled up a chair to his bedside and we waited together, allowing the minutes to tick unhurriedly by.
After what seemed like a mutually agreeable time, I stood up and bid him goodnight. The patient put his head to the pillow and promptly fell asleep. The ward was silent for the rest of the night.
I felt terribly guilty that I had committed an outright deception with this patient — something that is a true no-no. But on the other hand, it was the first night he got a full night of sleep, to say nothing of all the other patients on the ward and the rest of the staff.
When I related this story to Dr. Ted J. Kaptchuk, director of the program in placebo studies at Harvard, he gave a sigh of recognition. "We all have our moments of desperation," he said. "Usually around midnight."
Dr. Kaptchuk does not condone deception, but his research bears out that how caregivers present and administer treatments has a powerful effect on clinical outcomes.
Patients, for example, who received pain medicine directly from a doctor achieved better pain relief than patients who unknowingly received the same medicine, even at higher doses, automatically in their IVs. The rituals the doctor performs — drawing up the medication, visibly injecting it into the IV, discussing expected benefits — not to mention the attention and caring that comes with the presence of an actual human being — effected as much pain relief as doubling the dose of the medicine.
Placebos used to be thought of as psychological mumbo-jumbo more akin to hypnotism than real medicine. The biological breakthrough came in 1978, when researchers showed that not only was the placebo effect real, but that it could be reversed by administering naloxone — the chemical that blocks our endorphins, our natural painkillers.
Suddenly there was a plausible pharmacological mechanism for how placebos work and research in the field flowered. In June, Harvard Medical School and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation held an international medical conference devoted entirely to placebo science.
Dr. Kaptchuk describes placebos as not just the traditional sugar pill, but also "everything that surrounds a medical treatment": how caregivers describe the medication, how they administer it, the expectations they have for the medicine, their tone of voice, their strength of eye contact. In short, everything that doctors and nurses do in an interaction with a patient.
This is not especially surprising. Healers and shamans have known intuitively about the importance of this interaction since the dawn of time. Before we had developed treatments that could significantly impact the pathology of disease — antibiotics, chemotherapy, stents, organ transplants, transfusions — the "everything else" was the mainstay of medical care.
Doctors and nurses always feel a bit uneasy when it comes to placebos. Somehow it seems wrong, unethical, deceptive. But patients, it turns out, seem to be more flexible in their thinking. Studies have shown symptom relief even when patients are told they are getting a placebo; many patients are quite amenable to such "open-label" placebos. "If it gets rid of the pain," a patient once told me, "I don't care if it's a dill pickle!"
The ethics are evolving, but the general consensus is that transparency is the bottom line. What I did as a young — and desperate — resident wouldn't pass muster, because I deceived my patient about the medication. But if I'd told him that it was inert saline and if he was amenable to trying it, it could have been a reasonable treatment option. And it still might have helped him, especially if we had been able to have a detailed and compassionate conversation about his pain.
Dr. Kaptchuk thinks of placebo effects as just one of the many things in the toolkit of medicine. It would never be a substitute for appropriate medical care, but it is something that can enhance medical care greatly. Wise doctors and nurses already do this. They've found, usually just by personal experience, that their "everything else" — respect, attention, comfort, empathy, touch — often does the lion's share of medical care, no deception required. Sometimes the prescription is just the afterthought.
Danielle Ofri's newest book is "What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine." She is an associate professor of medicine at NYU School of Medicine and has cared for patients at Bellevue Hospital for more than 20 years. She is editor in chief of the Bellevue Literary Review.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/15/a-powerful-tool-in-the-doctors-toolkit/
Budweiser Is the Drink of Choice for People Who End Up in the ER - Julie Beck - The Atlantic
The only reasonable explanation for drinking Budweiser is to get drunk. It's certainly not for the taste. So it makes sense that in a pilot study of ER patients who'd been consuming alcohol, conducted by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the number one brand they'd been guzzling was Budweiser,NBC News reports.
Budweiser holds 9.1 percent of the national beer market in the U.S., but 15 percent of the questionably desirable demographic of people who drink and then end up in the emergency room. Also a top contender in the ER market is Steel Reserve, which only holds 0.8 percent of the U.S. beer market, but a whopping 14.7 percent of alcohol-inclined ER patients.
Bud Light, Bud Ice malt liquor and Colt 45 malt liquor also made strong showings in the hospital circuit.
The study is limited, of course, to the one small Baltimore hospital where the 105 patient interviews took place. (Sidebar: the survey takers wore white coats, which made patients more willing to talk—remember kids, not everyone in a white coat is a doctor)
Still, about one third of all ER visits involve alcohol in some way, and beer and malt liquor dominated in this particular study, so to improve your chances, perhaps reach for a refreshing glass of wine instead.
Thursday, August 15, 2013
Beautiful Pathologies - NYTimes.com
BOSTON
At our medical school, we have something called the organ transplant observation program, which allows students to shadow the doctors who transfer functional organs from deceased or living donors into the bodies of dying patients. It's pretty great. When it's your turn, you might go to a nearby hospital and watch surgeons put in a heart, or hop on a private plane and fly to another state to get a kidney. The program is wildly popular and often a highlight of the medical school experience. This year, over half of my class signed up as soon as the forms went online.
Getting through the red tape required to allow inexperienced first- and second-year medical students to observe these lifesaving operations always takes several months. I know, because I volunteered to help out with the setup process. Training sessions. Vaccination forms. Observation forms. Surgeon meetings. Sponsor signatures. Limited enrollment. Our class started the process in January and was not cleared until the end of April. Finally, the sign-up list was randomized and a pager was handed to the first lucky student. The waiting began.
A few weeks passed with little activity. One student was paged, but it turned out to be a false alarm. Frustrated classmates passed the beeper down the list, since you had to be constantly available and conflicts arise over time. We started questioning whether anyone would ever make it to an operating room. Then one morning in late May, someone did.
We were sitting in a pathology lecture on the differences between benign and malignant cell growth. The sleep-deprived were nodding off in the back. The future oncologists were furiously taking notes in the front. A shrill beeping rang through the auditorium — an everyday event when your teachers are practicing doctors. But this time, it did not come from the professor behind the podium. It did not come from any of the course directors sitting off to the side. It came from a student in the middle of the lecture hall, who stood up in shock and quickly gathered his things.
The entire class erupted in applause and started cheering his name. As he stumbled out the door, fiddling with the pager, excited chatter broke out.
"Do you think he'll get to fly somewhere?"
"I hope he gets to scrub in!"
Watching all of this, our instructor searched the audience for an explanation. Amid the laughing and the clapping, a classmate shouted a description of the program. Our professor was surprised — he had thought the exiting student was about to become a father. Now aware of what had transpired, he solemnly told us that he often took care of transplant patients. And he reminded us of what we had forgotten: that someone had probably just died.
The room fell quiet. We shifted uncomfortably in our seats. Dozens of Type A medical students, we were ashamed of what we had just done.
Later that day, we found out he was right. An elderly woman had been left brain-dead by a seizure, and the student had gone with a team to retrieve her liver. She was legally dead, but because of a ventilator and other supports, her heart was still beating and the surgeons had a little more time. Still, when they opened her up, they found that her liver wasn't healthy enough to warrant transplantation. So they packed up and drove home.
My classmates and I thought we were applauding the gift of an organ and the training of a friend. Instead, we had celebrated a seizure that ended a life and the dissection of a woman we did not know.
It's eerie to think about that morning, the strangeness of medical students cheering the news of someone's death. Yet these contradictions happen all the time in our education. Our lecturers say, "This is a great case," when describing a toddler who died from a rare cancer. Or, "Look at this beautiful pathology," when holding up the clogged heart of someone's father. I wonder if other professions share these kinds of perverse excitements. Do human resources trainees hear of "great" instances of sexual harassment? Do law students study "beautiful" murder cases?
In medicine, a lot of our training depends on the misfortune of others. Without sick people, we cannot learn to diagnose and treat. But we sometimes forget to manage our enthusiasm for the science of disease and, in doing so, ignore the human suffering that comes with the experience of disease.
When it's my turn to take the pager, I'll make sure to keep that in mind. I'll never forget the seizure that I clapped for — even as I cross my fingers, hoping to get the call.
Nathaniel P. Morris is a student at Harvard Medical School.
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
A Glut of Antidepressants - NYTimes.com
Over the past two decades, the use of antidepressants has skyrocketed. One in 10 Americans now takes an antidepressant medication; among women in their 40s and 50s, the figure is one in four.
Experts have offered numerous reasons. Depression is common, and economic struggles have added to our stress and anxiety. Television ads promote antidepressants, and insurance plans usually cover them, even while limiting talk therapy. But a recent study suggests another explanation: that the condition is being overdiagnosed on a remarkable scale.
The study, published in April in the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, found that nearly two-thirds of a sample of more than 5,000 patients who had been given a diagnosis of depression within the previous 12 months did not meet the criteria for major depressive episode as described by the psychiatrists' bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (or D.S.M.).
The study is not the first to find that patients frequently get "false positive" diagnoses for depression. Several earlier review studies have reported that diagnostic accuracy is low in general practice offices, in large part because serious depression is so rare in that setting.
Elderly patients were most likely to be misdiagnosed, the latest study found. Six out of seven patients age 65 and older who had been given a diagnosis of depression did not fit the criteria. More educated patients and those in poor health were less likely to receive an inaccurate diagnosis.
The vast majority of individuals diagnosed with depression, rightly or wrongly, were given medication, said the paper's lead author, Dr. Ramin Mojtabai, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Most people stay on the drugs, which can have a variety of side effects, for at least two years. Some take them for a decade or more.
"It's not only that physicians are prescribing more, the population is demanding more," Dr. Mojtabai said. "Feelings of sadness, the stresses of daily life and relationship problems can all cause feelings of upset or sadness that may be passing and not last long. But Americans have become more and more willing to use medication to address them."
By contrast, the Dutch College of General Practitioners last year urged its members to prescribe antidepressants only in severe cases, and instead to offer psychological treatment and other support with daily life. Officials noted that depressive symptoms may be a normal, transient reaction to disappointment or loss.
Ironically, while many patients in the United States are inappropriately diagnosed with depression, many who actually have it suffer without treatment. Dr. Mark Olfson, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, noted that from the time they develop major depression, it takes Americans eight years on average to seek care.
Diagnosing depression is an inherently subjective task, said Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, the president of the American Psychiatric Association.
"It would be great if we could do a blood test or a lab test or do an EKG," Dr. Lieberman said, noting that similar claims of overtreatment have been made about syndromes like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. "A diagnosis is made by symptoms and history and observation."
The new study drew 5,639 individuals who had been diagnosed with depression from among a nationally representative sample of over 75,000 adults who took part in the National Survey of Drug Use and Health in 2009 and 2010. The subjects were then interviewed in person with questions based on the D.S.M.-4 criteria.
Only 38.4 percent of the participants met these criteria for depression during the previous year, Dr. Mojtabai said.
It's possible some of the participants did not appear to be depressed because they had already been successfully treated, said Dr. Jeffrey Cain, the president of the Academy of Family Physicians. Their improved mood may also have colored the way they responded to questions about the past.
"If I'm checking people who are being treated for high blood pressure and taking medication, I would expect it to be better when I'm checking them," Dr. Cain said.
According to the D.S.M., a diagnosis of major depressive episode is appropriate if the patient has been in a depressed mood and felt no interest in activities for at least two weeks, and also has at least five symptoms that impair functioning almost every day. These include unintentional weight gain or loss, problems sleeping, agitation or slowed reactions noticed by others, fatigue and low energy, feelings of excessive guilt or worthlessness, difficulty concentrating and recurrent thoughts of death.
"We're not just talking about somebody who's having a bad day or got into an argument with their spouse," Dr. Lieberman said. "We're talking about something that is severe, meaning it's disabling and distressing and is not transient."
Many doctors have long prescribed antidepressants soon after the death of a family member, even though the D.S.M. urges clinicians to differentiate between normal grief and pathological bereavement.
One 50-year-old New York City woman said her doctor prescribed an antidepressant a few weeks after her husband died, even though she thought her feelings of shock and sadness were appropriate.
"He told me, 'You have to function, you have to keep your job, you have a daughter to raise,' " said the woman, who asked that her name be withheld because few friends or family members knew she was taking antidepressants.
Most of the study participants were not receiving specialty mental health care, but Dr. Cain pointed out that it was not clear who was making the misdiagnoses: a psychiatrist, non-psychiatrist physician or other provider, like a nurse practitioner.
But while a psychiatrist may spend up to 90 minutes with a patient before making a diagnosis, patients often are more comfortable with their primary care doctors, who rarely have that kind of time.
Dr. Lieberman suggested watchful waiting may be appropriate in some cases, and more integrated forms of health care may soon make it easier to send patients to a mental health provider "down the hall."
Doctors need to improve their diagnostic skills, Dr. Mojtabai said, and must resist the temptation "to take out the prescription pad and write down an antidepressant and hand it to the patient."
Monday, August 12, 2013
HLWIKI Canada
...an open, free-to-use global encyclopedia with ten (10) portals on health librarianship, social media and a range of information technology topics curated by a team of international health librarians
http://hlwiki.slais.ubc.ca/index.php/HLWIKI_International
http://hlwiki.slais.ubc.ca/index.php/HLWIKI_International
Frontiers | News in Medicine
Our grand vision is to build an Open Science platform that empowers researchers in their daily work and where everybody has equal opportunity to seek, share and generate knowledge.
http://www.frontiersin.org/news/Medicine
http://www.frontiersin.org/news/Medicine
SciBite :: Drug Discovery, Now
SciBite is real-time drug discovery search engine, tracking new developments within biotech and pharma. We offer unparalleled tracking of the drugs, targets, indications and companies that make up the global drug discovery landscape.
http://scibite.com/
http://scibite.com/
Risk of Adult Anxiety Seen in Children’s Stomachaches - NYTimes.com
Children with chronic stomach pains are at high risk for anxiety disorders in adolescence and young adulthood, a new study has found, suggesting that parents may wish to have their children evaluated at some point for anxiety.
Researchers at Vanderbilt University tracked 332 children with recurring stomachaches that could not be traced to a physical cause — so-called functional abdominal pain — comparing them as they reached young adulthood with 147 children who had never had such stomachaches.
About half the teenagers and young adults who had had functional abdominal pain as children developed an anxiety disorder at some point, compared with 20 percent of the control group, the researchers found. The vulnerability to anxiety persisted into adulthood even if the pain had disappeared, although the risk was highest if the pain continued.
Forty percent of the children with functional abdominal pain went on to experience depression, compared with 16 percent of those who had never had these stomachaches.
The study was published on Monday in the journal Pediatrics.
"What this study shows is a strong connection between functional abdominal pain and anxiety persists into adulthood, and it drives home the point that this isn't by chance," said Dr. John V. Campo, chairman of the department of psychiatry at Ohio State University, who was not involved in the new study.
In 2001, Dr. Campo published a smaller study that found that 28 young adults who had suffered functional abdominal pain as children were far more likely to have an anxiety disorder than 28 similar adults who had experienced another childhood illness.
Chronic abdominal pain affects 8 percent to 25 percent of school-age children. The problem can lead to school absences and take a toll on families.
"Somebody might say, 'Of course they have mental issues or they are emotionally distressed — it's because of the pain,' " said Lynn S. Walker, senior author of the study and director of the division of adolescent health at Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt.
"But we found even if the pain went away, these adolescents and young adults still have anxiety," Dr. Walker said. "So maybe we need to treat their anxiety."
The state-of-the-art treatment for functional abdominal pain is rehabilitative, focused on getting patients to participate in daily activities despite their stomachaches. "There's no question that there are triggers for the pain, but the problem is in the perception of the pain and adaptation to the pain," said Dr. Samuel Nurko, director of a functional abdominal pain center at Children's Hospital Boston.
Dr. Nurko compared the pain to a light on a dimmer switch, which psychological techniques can help children control. "You don't take away the pain," he said. "You 'dim' it to be able to cope better."
The new study underscores the importance of screening children with the condition for anxiety or depression, the authors said. Anxious children tend to be good children who are concerned about doing their best, Dr. Walker said, and parents may be flummoxed by the suggestion that such a child could be grappling with a mental health issue.
The majority of the children enrolled in the study "had not seen a mental health professional, ever," Dr. Walker said.
But Miranda van Tilburg, an associate professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, cautioned parents against leaping to the conclusion that a child's unexplained stomach pain is "all anxiety based, because we don't know that."
"The take-away message should be you should not be afraid, if your doctor talks to you about anxiety in your child, to seek help from a mental health professional, because it could help your child feel better," Dr. van Tilburg said.
Such a referral is "not an admission that that's what's causing the pain," she said. "It's just an admission that anxiety is linked to the pain."
Nasrin Kazemi, a part-time real estate agent in Brentwood, Tenn., has three children, all of whom had frequent stomachaches. "If I get a little more excited, or sad, or mad about something, my stomach will start hurting," said Mrs. Kazemi's youngest daughter, Donya, 11.
The anticipation of starting sixth grade this fall has set off new waves of stomach pain. "It's probably not going to stop until I get used to sixth grade," Donya said.
She became anxious two years ago after a ghastly fortnight of flu-induced vomiting, her mother said. Since then, Donya worries about attending birthday parties where she might catch another flu, and such concerns make her abdominal pain flare up.
At first, Mrs. Kazemi was reluctant to seek psychological help for Donya, but her daughter eventually saw Dr. Walker. Mrs. Kazemi is hopeful about the new research, even though it suggests that Donya may have a lifelong vulnerability to anxiety.
"Because she is learning to deal with her emotions and to not let them get the better of her, she'll be better with dealing with negative things that happen later in life," Mrs. Kazemi said.
Path to United States Practice Is Long Slog to Foreign Doctors - NYTimes.com
Thousands of foreign-trained immigrant physicians are living in the United States with lifesaving skills that are going unused because they stumbled over one of the many hurdles in the path toward becoming a licensed doctor here.
The involved testing process and often duplicative training these doctors must go through are intended to make sure they meet this country's high quality standards, which American medical industry groups say are unmatched elsewhere in the world. Some development experts are also loath to make it too easy for foreign doctors to practice here because of the risk of a "brain drain" abroad.
But many foreign physicians and their advocates argue that the process is unnecessarily restrictive and time-consuming, particularly since America's need for doctors will expand sharply in a few short months under President Obama's health care law. They point out that medical services cost far more in the United States than elsewhere in the world, in part because of such restrictions.
The United States already faces a shortage of physicians in many parts of the country, especially in specialties where foreign-trained physicians are most likely to practice, like primary care. And that shortage is going to get exponentially worse, studies predict, when the health care law insures millions more Americans starting in 2014.
The new health care law only modestly increases the supply of homegrown primary care doctors, not nearly enough to account for the shortfall, and even that tiny bump is still a few years away because it takes so long to train new doctors. Immigrant advocates and some economists point out that the medical labor force could grow much faster if the country tapped the underused skills of the foreign-trained physicians who are already here but are not allowed to practice. Canada, by contrast, has made efforts to recognize more high-quality training programs done abroad.
"It doesn't cost the taxpayers a penny because these doctors come fully trained," said Nyapati Raghu Rao, the Indian-born chairman of psychiatry at Nassau University Medical Center and a past chairman of the American Medical Association's international medical graduates governing council. "It is doubtful that the U.S. can respond to the massive shortages without the participation of international medical graduates. But we're basically ignoring them in this discussion and I don't know why that is."
Consider Sajith Abeyawickrama, 37, who was a celebrated anesthesiologist in his native Sri Lanka. But here in the United States, where he came in 2010 to marry, he cannot practice medicine.
Instead of working as a doctor himself, he has held a series of jobs in the medical industry, including an unpaid position where he entered patient data into a hospital's electronic medical records system, and, more recently, a paid position teaching a test prep course for students trying to become licensed doctors themselves.
For years the United States has been training too few doctors to meet its own needs, in part because of industry-set limits on the number of medical school slots available. Today about one in four physicians practicing in the United States were trained abroad, a figure that includes a substantial number of American citizens who could not get into medical school at home and studied in places like the Caribbean.
But immigrant doctors, no matter how experienced and well trained, must run a long, costly and confusing gantlet before they can actually practice here.
The process usually starts with an application to a private nonprofit organization that verifies medical school transcripts and diplomas. Among other requirements, foreign doctors must prove theyspeak English; pass three separate steps of the United States Medical Licensing Examination; get American recommendation letters, usually obtained after volunteering or working in a hospital, clinic or research organization; and be permanent residents or receive a work visa (which often requires them to return to their home country after their training).
The biggest challenge is that an immigrant physician must win one of the coveted slots in America's medical residency system, the step that seems to be the tightest bottleneck.
That residency, which typically involves grueling 80-hour workweeks, is required even if a doctor previously did a residency in a country with an advanced medical system, like Britain or Japan. The only exception is for doctors who did their residencies in Canada.
The whole process can consume upward of a decade — for those lucky few who make it through.
"It took me double the time I thought, since I was still having to work while I was studying to pay for the visa, which was very expensive," said Alisson Sombredero, 33, an H.I.V. specialist who came to the United States from Colombia in 2005.
Dr. Sombredero spent three years studying for her American license exams, gathering recommendation letters and volunteering at a hospital in an unpaid position. She supported herself during that time by working as a nanny. That was followed by three years in a residency at Highland Hospital in Oakland, Calif., and one year in an H.I.V. fellowship at San Francisco General Hospital. She finally finished her training this summer, eight years after she arrived in the United States and 16 years after she first enrolled in medical school.
Dr. Sombredero was helped through the process by the Welcome Back Initiative, an organization started 12 years ago as a partnership between San Francisco State University and City College of San Francisco. The organization has worked with about 4,600 physicians in its centers around the country, according to its founder, José Ramón Fernández-Peña.
Only 118 of those doctors, he said, have successfully made it to residency.
"If I had to even think about going through residency now, I'd shoot myself," said Dr. Fernández-Peña, who came to the United States from Mexico in 1985 and chose not even to try treating patients once he learned what the licensing process requires. Today, in addition to running the Welcome Back Initiative, he is an associate professor of health education at San Francisco State.
The counterargument for making it easier for foreign physicians to practice in the United States — aside from concerns about quality controls — is that doing so will draw more physicians from poor countries. These places often have paid for their doctors' medical training with public funds, on the assumption that those doctors will stay.
"We need to wean ourselves from our extraordinary dependence on importing doctors from the developing world," said Fitzhugh Mullan, a professor of medicine and health policy at George Washington University in Washington. "We can't tell other countries to nail their doctors' feet to the ground at home. People will want to move and they should be able to. But we have created a huge, wide, open market by undertraining here, and the developing world responds."
About one in 10 doctors trained in India have left that country, he found in a 2005 study, and the figure is close to one in three for Ghana. (Many of those moved to Europe or other developed nations other than the United States.)
No one knows exactly how many immigrant doctors are in the United States and not practicing, but some other data points provide a clue. Each year the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates, a private nonprofit, clears about 8,000 immigrant doctors (not including the American citizens who go to medical school abroad) to apply for the national residency match system. Normally about 3,000 of them successfully match to a residency slot, mostly filling less desired residencies in community hospitals, unpopular locations and in less lucrative specialties like primary care.
Over the last five years, an average of 42.1 percent of foreign-trained immigrant physicians who applied for residencies through the national match system succeeded. That compares with an average match rate of 93.9 percent for seniors at America's mainstream medical schools.
Mr. Abeyawickrama, the Sri Lankan anesthesiologist, has failed to match for three years in a row; he blames low test scores. Most foreign doctors spend several years studying and taking their licensing exams, which American-trained doctors also take. He said he didn't know this, and misguidedly thought it would be more expeditious to take all three within seven months of his arrival.
"That was the most foolish thing I ever did in my life," he says. "I had the knowledge, but I did not know the art of the exams here."
Even with inadequate preparation, he passed, though earning scores too low to be considered by most residency programs. But as a testament to his talents, he was recently offered a two-year research fellowship at the prestigious Cleveland Clinic, starting in the fall. He is hoping this job will give residency programs reason to overlook his test scores next time he applies.
"Once I finish my fellowship in Cleveland, at one of the best hospitals in America, I hope there will be some doors opening for me," he said. "Maybe then they will look at my scores and realize they do not depict my true knowledge."
The residency match rate for immigrants is likely to fall even lower in coming years. That is because the number of accredited American medical schools, and therefore United States-trained medical students, has increased substantially in the last decade, while the number of residency slots (most of which are subsizided by Medicare) has barely budged since Congress effectively froze residency funding in 1997.
Experts say several things could be done to make it easier for foreign-trained doctors to practice here, including reciprocal licensing arrangements, more and perhaps accelerated American residencies, or recognition of postgraduate training from other advanced countries.
Canada provides the most telling comparison. Some Canadian provinces allow immigrant doctors to practice family medicine without doing a Canadian residency, typically if the doctor did similar postgraduate work in the United States, Australia, Britain or Ireland. There are also residency waivers for some specialists coming from select training programs abroad considered similar to Canadian ones.
As a result, many (some estimates suggest nearly half) foreign-trained physicians currently coming into Canada do not have to redo a residency, said Dr. Rocco Gerace, the president of the Federation of Medical Regulatory Authorities of Canada.
In the United States, some foreign doctors work as waiters or taxi drivers while they try to work through the licensing process. Others decide to apply their skills to becoming another kind of medical professional, like a nurse practitioner or physician assistant, adopting careers that require fewer years of training. But those paths present barriers as well.
The same is true for other highly skilled medical professionals.
Hemamani Karuppiaharjunan, 40, was a dentist in her native India, which she left in 2000 to join her husband in the United States. She decided that going back to dentistry school in the United States while having two young children would be prohibitively time-consuming and expensive. Instead, she enrolled in a two-year dental hygiene program at Bergen Community College in Paramus, N.J., which cost her $30,000 instead of the $150,000 she would have needed to attend dental school. She graduated in 2012 at the top of her class and earns $42 an hour now, about half what she might make as a dentist in her area.
The loss of status has been harder.
"I rarely talk about it with patients," she said. When she does mention her background, they usually express sympathy. "I'm glad my education is still respected in that sense, that people do recognize what I've done even though I can't practice dentistry."
Sunday, August 11, 2013
When Doctors Discriminate - NYTimes.com
THE first time it was an ear, nose and throat doctor. I had an emergency visit for an ear infection, which was causing a level of pain I hadn't experienced since giving birth. He looked at the list of drugs I was taking for my bipolar disorder and closed my chart.
"I don't feel comfortable prescribing anything," he said. "Not with everything else you're on." He said it was probably safe to take Tylenol and politely but firmly indicated it was time for me to go. The next day my eardrum ruptured and I was left with minor but permanent hearing loss.
Another time I was lying on the examining table when a gastroenterologist I was seeing for the first time looked at my list of drugs and shook her finger in my face. "You better get yourself together psychologically," she said, "or your stomach is never going to get any better."
If you met me, you'd never know I was mentally ill. In fact, I've gone through most of my adult life without anyone ever knowing — except when I've had to reveal it to a doctor. And that revelation changes everything. It wipes clean the rest of my résumé, my education, my accomplishments, reduces me to a diagnosis.
I was surprised when, after one of these run-ins, my psychopharmacologist said this sort of behavior was all too common. At least 14 studies have shown that patients with a serious mental illness receive worse medical care than "normal" people. Last year the World Health Organization called the stigma and discrimination endured by people with mental health conditions "a hidden human rights emergency."
I never knew it until I started poking around, but this particular kind of discriminatory doctoring has a name. It's called "diagnostic overshadowing."
According to a review of studies done by the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College, London, it happens a lot. As a result, people with a serious mental illness — including bipolar disorder, major depression, schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder — end up with wrong diagnoses and are under-treated.
That is a problem, because if you are given one of these diagnoses you probably also suffer from one or more chronic physical conditions: though no one quite knows why, migraines, irritable bowel syndrome and mitral valve prolapse often go hand in hand with bipolar disorder.
Less mysterious is the weight gain associated with most of the drugs used to treat bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, which can easily snowball into diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and cardiovascular disease. The drugs can also sedate you into a state of zombiedom, which can make going to the gym — or even getting off your couch — virtually impossible.
It's little wonder that many people with a serious mental illness don't seek medical attention when they need it. As a result, many of us end up in emergency rooms — where doctors, confronted with an endless stream of drug addicts who come to their door looking for an easy fix — are often all too willing to equate mental illness with drug-seeking behavior and refuse to prescribe pain medication.
I should know: a few years ago I had a persistent migraine, and after weeks trying to get an appointment with any of the handful of headache specialists in New York City, I broke down and went to the E.R. My husband filled out paperwork and gave the nurse my list of drugs. The doctors finally agreed to give me something stronger than what my psychopharmacologist could prescribe for the pain and hooked me up to an IV.
I lay there for hours wearing sunglasses to block out the fluorescent light, waiting for the pain relievers to kick in. But the headache continued. "They gave you saline and electrolytes," my psychopharmacologist said later. "Welcome to being bipolar."
When I finally saw the specialist two weeks later (during which time my symptoms included numbness and muscle weakness), she accused me of being "a serious cocaine user" (I don't touch the stuff) and of displaying symptoms of "la belle indifference," a 19th-century term for a kind of hysteria in which the patient converts emotional symptoms into physical ones — i.e., it was all in my head.
Indeed, given my experience over the last two decades, I shouldn't have been surprised by the statistics I found in the exhaustive report "Morbidity and Mortality in People with Serious Mental Illness," a review of studies published in 2006 that provides an overview of recommendations and general call to arms by the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors. The take-away: people who suffer from a serious mental illness and use the public health care system die 25 years earlier than those without one.
True, suicide is a big factor, accounting for 30 to 40 percent of early deaths. But 60 percent die of preventable or treatable conditions. First on the list is, unsurprisingly, cardiovascular disease. Two studies showed that patients with both a mental illness and a cardiovascular condition received about half the number of follow-up interventions, like bypass surgery or cardiac catheterization, after having a heart attack than did the "normal" cardiac patients.
The report also contains a list of policy recommendations, including designating patients with serious mental illnesses as a high-priority population; coordinating and integrating mental and physical health care for such people; education for health care workers and patients; and a quality-improvement process that supports increased access to physical health care and ensures appropriate prevention, screening and treatment services.
Such changes, if implemented, might make a real difference. And after seven years of no change, signs of movement are popping up, particularly among academic programs aimed at increasing awareness of mental health issues. Several major medical schools now have programs in the medical humanities, an emerging field that draws on diverse disciplines including the visual arts, humanities, music and science to make medical students think differently about their patients. And Johns Hopkins offers a doctor of public health with a specialization in mental health.
Perhaps the most notable of these efforts — and so far the only one of its kind — is the narrative medicine program at Columbia University Medical Center, which starts with the premise that there is a disconnect between health care and patients and that health care workers need to start listening to what their patients are telling them, and not just looking at what's written on their charts.
According to the program's mission statement, "The effective practice of health care requires the ability to recognize, absorb, interpret, and act on the stories and plights of others. Medicine practiced with narrative competence is a model for humane and effective medical practice."
We can only hope that humanizing programs like this one become a requirement for all health care workers. Maybe then "first, do no harm" will apply to everyone, even the mentally ill.
By Juliann Garey, the author of the novel "Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See" and a co-editor of "Voices of Bipolar Disorder: The Healing Companion."
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/11/opinion/sunday/when-doctors-discriminate.html?_r=1&&pagewanted=print
"I don't feel comfortable prescribing anything," he said. "Not with everything else you're on." He said it was probably safe to take Tylenol and politely but firmly indicated it was time for me to go. The next day my eardrum ruptured and I was left with minor but permanent hearing loss.
Another time I was lying on the examining table when a gastroenterologist I was seeing for the first time looked at my list of drugs and shook her finger in my face. "You better get yourself together psychologically," she said, "or your stomach is never going to get any better."
If you met me, you'd never know I was mentally ill. In fact, I've gone through most of my adult life without anyone ever knowing — except when I've had to reveal it to a doctor. And that revelation changes everything. It wipes clean the rest of my résumé, my education, my accomplishments, reduces me to a diagnosis.
I was surprised when, after one of these run-ins, my psychopharmacologist said this sort of behavior was all too common. At least 14 studies have shown that patients with a serious mental illness receive worse medical care than "normal" people. Last year the World Health Organization called the stigma and discrimination endured by people with mental health conditions "a hidden human rights emergency."
I never knew it until I started poking around, but this particular kind of discriminatory doctoring has a name. It's called "diagnostic overshadowing."
According to a review of studies done by the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College, London, it happens a lot. As a result, people with a serious mental illness — including bipolar disorder, major depression, schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder — end up with wrong diagnoses and are under-treated.
That is a problem, because if you are given one of these diagnoses you probably also suffer from one or more chronic physical conditions: though no one quite knows why, migraines, irritable bowel syndrome and mitral valve prolapse often go hand in hand with bipolar disorder.
Less mysterious is the weight gain associated with most of the drugs used to treat bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, which can easily snowball into diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and cardiovascular disease. The drugs can also sedate you into a state of zombiedom, which can make going to the gym — or even getting off your couch — virtually impossible.
It's little wonder that many people with a serious mental illness don't seek medical attention when they need it. As a result, many of us end up in emergency rooms — where doctors, confronted with an endless stream of drug addicts who come to their door looking for an easy fix — are often all too willing to equate mental illness with drug-seeking behavior and refuse to prescribe pain medication.
I should know: a few years ago I had a persistent migraine, and after weeks trying to get an appointment with any of the handful of headache specialists in New York City, I broke down and went to the E.R. My husband filled out paperwork and gave the nurse my list of drugs. The doctors finally agreed to give me something stronger than what my psychopharmacologist could prescribe for the pain and hooked me up to an IV.
I lay there for hours wearing sunglasses to block out the fluorescent light, waiting for the pain relievers to kick in. But the headache continued. "They gave you saline and electrolytes," my psychopharmacologist said later. "Welcome to being bipolar."
When I finally saw the specialist two weeks later (during which time my symptoms included numbness and muscle weakness), she accused me of being "a serious cocaine user" (I don't touch the stuff) and of displaying symptoms of "la belle indifference," a 19th-century term for a kind of hysteria in which the patient converts emotional symptoms into physical ones — i.e., it was all in my head.
Indeed, given my experience over the last two decades, I shouldn't have been surprised by the statistics I found in the exhaustive report "Morbidity and Mortality in People with Serious Mental Illness," a review of studies published in 2006 that provides an overview of recommendations and general call to arms by the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors. The take-away: people who suffer from a serious mental illness and use the public health care system die 25 years earlier than those without one.
True, suicide is a big factor, accounting for 30 to 40 percent of early deaths. But 60 percent die of preventable or treatable conditions. First on the list is, unsurprisingly, cardiovascular disease. Two studies showed that patients with both a mental illness and a cardiovascular condition received about half the number of follow-up interventions, like bypass surgery or cardiac catheterization, after having a heart attack than did the "normal" cardiac patients.
The report also contains a list of policy recommendations, including designating patients with serious mental illnesses as a high-priority population; coordinating and integrating mental and physical health care for such people; education for health care workers and patients; and a quality-improvement process that supports increased access to physical health care and ensures appropriate prevention, screening and treatment services.
Such changes, if implemented, might make a real difference. And after seven years of no change, signs of movement are popping up, particularly among academic programs aimed at increasing awareness of mental health issues. Several major medical schools now have programs in the medical humanities, an emerging field that draws on diverse disciplines including the visual arts, humanities, music and science to make medical students think differently about their patients. And Johns Hopkins offers a doctor of public health with a specialization in mental health.
Perhaps the most notable of these efforts — and so far the only one of its kind — is the narrative medicine program at Columbia University Medical Center, which starts with the premise that there is a disconnect between health care and patients and that health care workers need to start listening to what their patients are telling them, and not just looking at what's written on their charts.
According to the program's mission statement, "The effective practice of health care requires the ability to recognize, absorb, interpret, and act on the stories and plights of others. Medicine practiced with narrative competence is a model for humane and effective medical practice."
We can only hope that humanizing programs like this one become a requirement for all health care workers. Maybe then "first, do no harm" will apply to everyone, even the mentally ill.
By Juliann Garey, the author of the novel "Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See" and a co-editor of "Voices of Bipolar Disorder: The Healing Companion."
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/11/opinion/sunday/when-doctors-discriminate.html?_r=1&&pagewanted=print
When a Co-Pay Gets in the Way of Health - NYTimes.com
We want patients to receive the best care available. We also want consumers to pay less. And we don't want to bankrupt the government or private insurers. Something must give.
The debate centers on how to make these trade-offs, and who gets to make them. The stakes are high, and the choices are at times unseemly. No matter how necessary, putting human suffering into dollars and cents is not attractive work. It's no surprise, then, that the conversation is so heated.
What is a surprise is that amid these complex issues, one policy sidesteps these trade-offs. A few drugs — such as beta-blockers, statins and glycogen control medications — have proved very effective at managing hypertension, heart disease, diabetes and strokes. Most insurance plans charge something for them. Why not make drugs like these free? Not for everyone, but just the groups for whom they are provably effective.
In traditional economics, such a policy creates waste. The basic principle is moral hazard: consumers overuse goods that are subsidized. This is why people fly in business class when they're on an expense account but in economy when it's on their own dime.
In health care, a doctor or patient might order an extra test casually, just because it's free. This is inefficiency at its worst: from money spent on costly procedures to tests and medicines that provide little medical benefit, some actions are undertaken only because someone else picks up the check. To discourage this waste, insurance plans charge co-payments. The logic is simple: if patients face costs, they will think more carefully about the benefits.
But people don't always follow a cost-benefit logic. Consider a patient recovering from a heart attack. A small cocktail of drugs may cost a trivial amount — say, $5 — yet it reduces the risk of subsequent heart disease mortality by as much as 80 percent. That's a good deal, but as many as 50 percent of people fail to take these medications regularly.
The problem is basic human psychology. Heart disease is silent, with few noticeable symptoms. You feel fine most of the time, so it's all too easy to justify skipping the statin.
The problem here is the exact opposite of moral hazard. People are not overusing ineffective drugs; they are underusing highly effective ones. This is a quandary that two colleagues — Katherine Baicker, a professor of health economics at Harvard, and Josh Schwartzstein, a professor of economics at Dartmouth — and I call "behavioral hazard."
We've found that co-payments do not resolve behavioral hazard. They make it worse. They reduce the use of a drug that is already underused.
A recent experiment by a team led by Niteesh Choudhry, a professor of medicine at Harvard, quantifies the problem. The experiment involved nearly 6,000 patients who had just suffered a heart attack, and were prescribed drugs known to reduce the chance of another one — statins, beta-blockers, angiotensin-converting-enzyme inhibitors or angiotensin-receptor blockers. Half had their co-pays for these drugs waived; the other half paid the usual fee.
As expected, more people in the zero co-pay group took the drugs, and their health improved. Those in the zero co-pay group were 31 percent less likely to have a stroke, 11 percent less likely to have another major "vascular episode" and 16 percent less likely to have a myocardial infarction or unstable angina. None of these benefits came at a net monetary cost. The insurers did not spend more in total. By some measures, they spent less.
Behavioral hazard affects all of the drugs listed above. They are all highly effective, and yet adherence to taking them is a problem. This is a major financial issue. The New England Healthcare Institute has estimated that solving non-adherence could save $290 billion a year, or 13 percent of total annual medical spending in the United States. A number this large is surely open to quibbling, but divide it by 10 and it is still a large figure.
I'm not proposing to make all health care free, or arguing for a return to so-called Cadillac health plans. Moral hazard is all too real for many treatments, and in some cases, behavioral hazard reinforces it. Just as people underrespond to inconspicuous symptoms, they can also overrespond to highly noticeable ones. People may seek too much care for back pain, for example, resorting to ineffective or possibly even harmful treatments. Behavioral hazard suggests that we need even larger co-payments for these overused drugs.
My proposal is targeted: Take drugs that are shown to be of very high benefit to some people, and make those drugs free for them.
It's a simple policy change, and it isn't meant as a complete solution.
First, researchers like A. Mark Fendrick, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan, and Michael Chernew, now a professor of health care policy at Harvard, argue eloquently for what they call "value based" health insurance. All co-pays should depend on measured medical value; high co-pays should be reserved for drugs and medical services that have little proven value.
Second, some people will neglect to take their medications even if co-pays are zero. This proved true even in the Choudhry study.
Fully solving this problem requires more creativity. GlowCaps, for example, are high-tech tops for pill bottles. They beep and text you if you forget to take your medication. In another approach,Kevin Volpp, a professor of medicine and health care management at the University of Pennsylvania, and his colleagues use lotteries, giving people a chance to win only if they take their medications.
FINALLY, some will suggest that focusing on drug adherence is like closing the barn door. Why not focus instead on the behaviors — eating unhealthy foods or shunning exercise — that created the conditions we must now treat with drugs?
Each of these points has some merit. But they fail the "perfect as the enemy of the good" test. Sure, we should do more. But meanwhile, why continue to charge the same co-pay for statins and beta-blockers as we do for Viagra? At the very least, we need to experiment more with this policy.
Sendhil Mullainathan is a professor of economics at Harvard.
Yes to Coffee and Wine: Rewriting the Rules of Pregnancy - WSJ.com
When I got pregnant three years ago, I knew that I'd face lots of decisions—whether to have coffee or a glass of wine, what kind of prenatal testing to do, whether to use an epidural. I figured that I'd study the pros and cons and then make my own informed choices, as I normally did (with guidance and information from my doctor, of course).
This isn't what it was like at all.
In reality, medical care during pregnancy seemed to be one long list of rules. Being pregnant was a good deal like being a child again. There was always someone telling me what to do, but the recommendations from books and medical associations were vague and sometimes contradictory. It started right away. "You can only have two cups of coffee a day." I wondered why. What did the numbers say about how risky one, two or three cups were? This wasn't discussed anywhere.
Is drinking while pregnant really that bad? Economist Emily Oster talks with Wendy Bounds about the research behind the most common pregnancy taboos.
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The key to good decision making is evaluating the available information—the data—and combining it with your own estimates of pluses and minuses. As an economist, I do this every day. It turns out, however, that this kind of training isn't really done much in medical schools. Medical school tends to focus much more, appropriately, on the mechanics of being a doctor.
When I asked my doctor about drinking wine, she said that one or two glasses a week was "probably fine." But "probably fine" isn't a number. In search of real answers, I combed through hundreds of studies—the ones that the recommendations were based on—to get to the good data. This is where another part of my training as an economist came in: I knew enough to read the numbers correctly. What I found was surprising.
The key problem lies in separating correlation from causation. The claim that you should stop having coffee while pregnant, for instance, is based on causal reasoning: If you change nothing else, you'll be less likely to have a miscarriage if you drink less coffee. But what we see in the data is only a correlation—the women who drink coffee are more likely to miscarry. There are also many other differences between women who drink coffee and those who don't, differences that could themselves be responsible for the differences in miscarriage rates.
This problem is partially surmountable with better data, and I found that the best studies often painted a picture different from the official recommendations. Actually getting the numbers led me to a more relaxed place—a glass of wine every now and then, plenty of coffee, exercise when I wanted it. The economist's toolbox may not be known as a great stress reliever, but in this case it really was.
Consider weight gain. Almost every woman I have spoken to about pregnancy has a story about her doctor giving her a hard time about her weight. Later in my pregnancy it felt like all of my time with my doctor was focused on how fat I was getting—so fat! I was supposed to gain between 25 to 35 pounds. At one visit it seemed like I was on track for 36 pounds, and I got a serious scolding.
It's well known that frequent heavy drinking or binge drinking can cause fetal alcohol syndrome, with serious long-term consequences for your child. Yet the evidence shows that light drinking is fine.
What's the big deal? If you gain more weight during pregnancy, your baby will—on average—be larger. Babies who are very large are termed "large for gestational age." Babies who are very small are termed "small for gestational age." Babies in both categories are more likely to have complications.
Weight-gain guidelines are designed to maximize the chance that your baby is normal sized. If you gain less weight than recommended, you increase your chance of a small baby and decrease your chance of a large baby; vice versa if you gain more than recommended.
There is a nice logic to this, but I quickly realized that very small babies are associated with many more—and more serious—complications than very large babies. The main concern with a very large baby is difficulty in delivery. Very small babies have an increased risk of breathing problems and neurological complications.
The recommendations—which focus only on the probability of each thing happening and not on the magnitude of the problem—are incomplete. In the end, I concluded that I should be more worried about gaining too little weight than too much.
Pregnant women are also given a long list of off-limit foods: deli meats, soft cheeses, sushi. These are restricted because of the risk of various pathogens. The most serious by far is listeria bacteria, to which pregnant women are especially susceptible; it can cause late miscarriage and stillbirth.
I knew I didn't want to snack directly on listeria bacteria, but I wondered how much I could limit my risk by avoiding certain foods. What share of listeria infections was due to soft cheeses, for instance? It turns out that queso fresco, a Mexican soft cheese, has been implicated in about 20% of listeria outbreaks since 1998, and deli turkey in 10%. The rest of the recent outbreaks seemed random. One involved cantaloupe, another one, celery.
I concluded that avoiding queso fresco and deli turkey was a good idea, but in the end I didn't feel that it made sense even to exclude other deli meats. My best guess was that avoiding sliced ham would lower my risk of listeria from 1 in 8,333 to 1 in 8,255. I just didn't think it was worth it. It would have made more sense to avoid cantaloupe.
But food prohibitions are minor compared with the two items that women are most emphatically warned away from consuming during pregnancy: alcohol and coffee.
More ...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323514404578652091268307904.html
This isn't what it was like at all.
In reality, medical care during pregnancy seemed to be one long list of rules. Being pregnant was a good deal like being a child again. There was always someone telling me what to do, but the recommendations from books and medical associations were vague and sometimes contradictory. It started right away. "You can only have two cups of coffee a day." I wondered why. What did the numbers say about how risky one, two or three cups were? This wasn't discussed anywhere.
Is drinking while pregnant really that bad? Economist Emily Oster talks with Wendy Bounds about the research behind the most common pregnancy taboos.
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The key to good decision making is evaluating the available information—the data—and combining it with your own estimates of pluses and minuses. As an economist, I do this every day. It turns out, however, that this kind of training isn't really done much in medical schools. Medical school tends to focus much more, appropriately, on the mechanics of being a doctor.
When I asked my doctor about drinking wine, she said that one or two glasses a week was "probably fine." But "probably fine" isn't a number. In search of real answers, I combed through hundreds of studies—the ones that the recommendations were based on—to get to the good data. This is where another part of my training as an economist came in: I knew enough to read the numbers correctly. What I found was surprising.
The key problem lies in separating correlation from causation. The claim that you should stop having coffee while pregnant, for instance, is based on causal reasoning: If you change nothing else, you'll be less likely to have a miscarriage if you drink less coffee. But what we see in the data is only a correlation—the women who drink coffee are more likely to miscarry. There are also many other differences between women who drink coffee and those who don't, differences that could themselves be responsible for the differences in miscarriage rates.
This problem is partially surmountable with better data, and I found that the best studies often painted a picture different from the official recommendations. Actually getting the numbers led me to a more relaxed place—a glass of wine every now and then, plenty of coffee, exercise when I wanted it. The economist's toolbox may not be known as a great stress reliever, but in this case it really was.
Consider weight gain. Almost every woman I have spoken to about pregnancy has a story about her doctor giving her a hard time about her weight. Later in my pregnancy it felt like all of my time with my doctor was focused on how fat I was getting—so fat! I was supposed to gain between 25 to 35 pounds. At one visit it seemed like I was on track for 36 pounds, and I got a serious scolding.
It's well known that frequent heavy drinking or binge drinking can cause fetal alcohol syndrome, with serious long-term consequences for your child. Yet the evidence shows that light drinking is fine.
What's the big deal? If you gain more weight during pregnancy, your baby will—on average—be larger. Babies who are very large are termed "large for gestational age." Babies who are very small are termed "small for gestational age." Babies in both categories are more likely to have complications.
Weight-gain guidelines are designed to maximize the chance that your baby is normal sized. If you gain less weight than recommended, you increase your chance of a small baby and decrease your chance of a large baby; vice versa if you gain more than recommended.
There is a nice logic to this, but I quickly realized that very small babies are associated with many more—and more serious—complications than very large babies. The main concern with a very large baby is difficulty in delivery. Very small babies have an increased risk of breathing problems and neurological complications.
The recommendations—which focus only on the probability of each thing happening and not on the magnitude of the problem—are incomplete. In the end, I concluded that I should be more worried about gaining too little weight than too much.
Pregnant women are also given a long list of off-limit foods: deli meats, soft cheeses, sushi. These are restricted because of the risk of various pathogens. The most serious by far is listeria bacteria, to which pregnant women are especially susceptible; it can cause late miscarriage and stillbirth.
I knew I didn't want to snack directly on listeria bacteria, but I wondered how much I could limit my risk by avoiding certain foods. What share of listeria infections was due to soft cheeses, for instance? It turns out that queso fresco, a Mexican soft cheese, has been implicated in about 20% of listeria outbreaks since 1998, and deli turkey in 10%. The rest of the recent outbreaks seemed random. One involved cantaloupe, another one, celery.
I concluded that avoiding queso fresco and deli turkey was a good idea, but in the end I didn't feel that it made sense even to exclude other deli meats. My best guess was that avoiding sliced ham would lower my risk of listeria from 1 in 8,333 to 1 in 8,255. I just didn't think it was worth it. It would have made more sense to avoid cantaloupe.
But food prohibitions are minor compared with the two items that women are most emphatically warned away from consuming during pregnancy: alcohol and coffee.
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323514404578652091268307904.html
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