Medical Marijuana?
NY Physicians Reluctant To Prescribe Medical Marijuana As Alternative To Opioids For Chronic Pain. Crain’s New York Business (1/29, Lewis) reports that although medical marijuana “offers an alternative to opioid drugs for treating chronic pain,” most physicians in New York “are still reluctant to embrace cannabis as a medical treatment.” According to Crain’s, “only 833 physicians, about 1% of the state’s total, are certified to prescribe the drug.” The article mentions that the Medical Society of the State of New York wrote a letter to the state Health Department in December that “called the...
Read MorePopulation Health
What does the future hold? In a series of article on Population Health this week in Medical Economics (click on image below) the authors discuss a number of recent developments in medical practice that we’ve been actively involved in at His Branches Health Services over the past few years. One of the primary questions is, how will these changes be affected by the recent shift in power in Washington, DC? What is “population health”? By definition it is “the health outcomes of a group of individuals, including the distribution of such outcomes within the group,”...
Read MoreHigh Prices for Drugs With Generic Alternatives
The Curious Case of Duexis Aaron Hakim, MS and Joseph S. Ross, MD, MHS JAMA Intern Med. Published online January 23, 2017. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.8423 Approximately 13% of health care expenditures in the United States are for prescription drug spending, nearly $420 billion in 2015. High-priced pharmaceuticals, therapies that cost more than $600 per month, are projected to eclipse 50% of total drug spending by 2018. Price increases for these therapies have been persistent, with unit costs increasing 164% between 2008 and 2015. Pharmacy benefit managers are third-party administrators...
Read MoreHPV high in men
The first national estimate suggests that nearly half of US men have genital infections caused by a sexually transmitted virus and that one in four has strains linked with several cancers, the Associated Press reports. Most human papillomavirus infections cause no symptoms and disappear without treatment, and most adults will get an HPV infection at some point in their lives. But high-risk HPV can cause cancer in the mouth and upper throat, cervical cancer in women, and other cancers; less harmful strains can cause genital warts. Who is at risk? Vaccines can prevent infections, but experts...
Read MoreVaccine Controversy?
Benefits are a matter of fact I have started, scratched out and even abandoned the writing of this essay. I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t there. Didn’t feel it. Something kept nagging at me, and it took some time to finally figure out what it was. It’s the idea that this article would be labeled “opinion” or “editorial” in the first place. Sure, there are some topics that seem to lend themselves appropriately to opinion pages. Vaccines, however, which have prevented 6 million deaths every ear worldwide and have fundamentally changed modern...
Read More
