Hot MedFax

This will come as a big surprise.  Hospitals offer tests patients don't really need. According to a story by Julie Appleby, hoping to attract patients and promote good will in the community, hospitals "are teaming up with medical-screening companies to promote tests they say might prevent deadly strokes or heart disease." But they're not just offering them to people who might become sick but to those without symptoms or other risk factors.  In other words, these tests are totally useless for many and could prove harmful.  In a lot of cases, they're being given just to make money. Appleby quotes a government panel that notes that these tests find "too few problems" when weighed against the drawbacks -- unnecessary CT or MRI scans, biopsies, sometimes even surgeries. And guess what else?  The tests increase healthcare costs. “A lot that ends up being found is clinically of no importance at all,” Steven Weinberger, executive vice president and chi...

Not that you don't have enough to fear when your doctor orders an MRI, but now don't go in there thinking he's a jerk for keeping you waiting.  According to a new Cornell study, MRIs can now pick up on what you're thinking. By scanning your brain, it's alleged that doctors can figure out what you think of others.  My mother-in-law comes to mind! David Worthington writes, "Volunteers were asked to consider how specific people might react to situations after studying those individuals’ personality traits. By analyzing the brain activation patterns, researchers were consistently able to recognize which person a volunteer was thinking about." However, it doesn't work on those who have autism or other types of mental illness. Spooky?  You bet.  Worthington adds that MRI technology has "already been deployed in courtrooms as a lie detector, can be used to predict how well someone will learn, and is being used to more accurately map the human b...