Hot MedFax

Patty Duke died today last week. A lot of Baby Boomers have died recently. Garry Shandling. David Bowie. Glenn Frey. And now, Patty Duke. I was connected to her in a very personal way. When we were preteens, my best friend (also my cousin), and I used to sit in front of the TV in our sponge curlers and Lanz nightgowns, fantasizing about what it would be like to be Patty, always getting into trouble (but having fun) in high school. We loved, too, Cathy, her identical perfectly behaved but boring cousin from Scotland (with that adorable accent). I was always Cathy. This is what high school would be like, falling in love with our French teachers, switching places to fool teachers, Cathy getting a flu shot when they thought she was Patty. And that flip haircut! Kind of like us. Then came the drugs and divorces, and bipolar disorder, and no more sweet Patty Lane. The fairy tale ended. For a long time, her life was in decline. Just like a lot of us. But t...

It used to creep me out when a new baby was born somewhere in our extended family and one of our older members would say, "That means someone will die." While I'm not too terribly superstitious (knock on wood), that always used to make me look around uneasily when a baby was born, or when someone died.  It seemed to be pretty true. The New York Times reports today that a baby is no longer being born every time someone dies .  In fact, for whites, fewer babies were born this year than older folks dying.  This year, for the first time in at least a century, according to Sam Roberts, the two did not cancel each other out.  More people died.  So?  Actually, it's quite significant. Roberts calls it "a benchmark that heralds profound demographic change." The number of non-Hispanic white Americans is expected to begin declining by the end of this decade.       “These new census estimates are an early signal alerting us to the impending decl...

Want to know what a Heme-8 Lab costs? Or a Heme-8 with Automated Differentiated Lab?  They're each $9.37 at Johns Hopkins and it may not matter to you what they are (blood tests for diseases like lupus and others), or how much they cost. But it's starting to, for doctors, and it's helping to bring down healthcare costs, according to Sarah Kliff at The Washington Post.  She reports that, "for six months, doctors ordering certain lab tests" were able to "call up both the type of the test," and what Medicare would pay for it. It's actually caused doctors to order almost 10% fewer tests, Kliff notes.  Once the hospital started studying the costs, and relaying them to doctors, it saved $3.79 per test per day per patient.  That may not sound like much, but times thousands of patients, it's paying off. Kliff writes that doctors were not penalized for writing orders for more expensive tests, the price just got billed to the insurance company (and w...