New rules for physician payments through Medicare went into effect on January 1. Here’s what you need to know. In 2015, the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) was signed into law. The legislation called for significant changes to how physicians are paid for treating Medicare patients. It repealed the Sustainable Growth Rate formula […]
More parlor tricks are ahead for your salad. Researchers are working on a more flavorful tomato through gene-isolating technology. This is not the introduction of genes from another species, as was the case with the GMO Flavr-Savr tomato, but neither is it traditional plant breeding. If you are old enough, you will recall that tomatoes […]
Meanwhile, the FDA won’t stop trying to eliminate brain health supplements. We think they want to clear the field for when they finally do approve a drug. Two years ago we reported that Eli Lilly had a potential blockbuster drug for Alzheimer’s in the third and final phase of FDA trials. If it won approval, […]
Do you want this stuff on your dinner plate? Action Alert! Researchers have conducted a groundbreaking new study that shows a link between Roundup and severe liver damage. The study found that Roundup administered to rats at extremely low doses caused non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) over two years. NAFLD can lead to cirrhosis, and […]
Another example of profits coming before people in the medical establishment. (Note that prostate and breast cancers have many similarities, so women may want to read this for themselves as well as for the men in their lives.) Last year, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published an editorial advising doctors to be […]
How strontium can help you rebuild your bones. Last December, a seventy-seven year old woman (we’ll call her Sarah, although that’s not her real name) told me that she’d been advised that her recent bone scan was 100% normal. In 2010, she’d been told she was “into osteoporosis.” She’d been advised to use a patent […]
Pesticides in your Froot Loops is only one of the problems. The Kellogg Company recently announced it was pulling ads from a news agency it felt was “not aligned with our values as a company.” Fair enough. But this leads to an obvious question: the “values” the company says it is protecting—just what are they? […]
More reason to question their common use among the very old and very young. A new study has found that taking powerful antipsychotic drugs significantly increases the likelihood of premature death for Alzheimer’s patients. The study looked at 58,000 people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s between 2005 and 2011. Those who were prescribed antipsychotics (usually to control […]
Is it reaching a criminal level? A recent report by Reuters details how hospitals around the country are outrageously negligent when it comes to reporting outbreaks of antibiotic-resistant infections, and it’s costing lives. Consider this story. Between 2008 and 2011, twenty-one patients were infected with a deadly, drug-resistant bug at St. Anthony’s Medical Center in […]
Studies on the effectiveness of the drug industry’s biggest sellers are frankly shocking, according to researchers. We—as individual consumers and as taxpayers—are apparently wasting money on expensive drugs that don’t work. And the side effects are often disastrous. “Every day, millions of people are taking medications that will not help them,” says Nicholas J. Schork, […]