Here's your reminder to set your VCR or TiVo for "Something the Lord Made," an HBO movie based on the true-life collaboration between a white surgeon and a black lab technician who together pioneered a surgical procedure to save "blue babies" in the 1940s. It airs Sunday night. Check local listings.
Read more at the HBO web site. Or listen to a “Weekend Edition” story that aired on National Public Radio this morning.
Thirty-six percent of Americans use complementary and alternative medicine, according to a government survey of more than 31,000 adults. When prayer for health reasons was included in the definition, that percentage rose to 62 percent.
According to survey results released today, the 10 most commonly used alternative therapies and the percentage of American adults using each were:
• Prayer for own health, 43 percent
• Prayer by others for the respondent's health, 24 percent
• Natural products (herbs, botanicals, enzymes), 19 percent
• Deep breathing exercises, 12 percent
• Participation in prayer group for own health, 10 percent
• Meditation, 8 percent
• Chiropractic care, 8 percent
• Yoga, 5 percent
• Massage, 5 percent
• Diet-based therapies (Atkins, Pritikin, Ornish, Zone diets), 4 percent.
The survey was part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 2002 National Health Interview Survey.
Kentucky doctors are seeking permission from an ethics board to perform a face transplant, according to the cover story of the May 29 New Scientist magazine. The surgery is intended for patients severely disfigured by burns or other accidents, not as cosmetic surgery destined for next season of "The Swan." A lifetime of immunosuppressant drugs would be required.
Childhood vaccines don’t cause autism, according to a new review of the scientific evidence by the Institute of Medicine. You can read the full report here.
It states that neither the mercury-based vaccine preservative called thimerosal nor the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine is associated with autism.
Reuters news service reports today that the Canadian government is proposing making the morning-after pill available over the counter. Read the article.
Earlier this month, U.S. Food and Drug Administration leaders decided to deny over-the-counter status to Plan B, a morning-after pill. But the FDA did open the door for Barr Pharmaceuticals to submit more data on how young teenagers would be able to use the emergency contraception pill safely without a doctor’s advice.
Today is Health Beat's birthday! I would post myself a cake, but I'm in Kelowna, B.C., working on a story about the Canadian health-care system. So have a piece for me.
Here's an example of how journalists sometimes inflate the conclusions of small research projects: A study on caffeine is being reported as suggesting that small doses of coffee throughout the day work better to stimulate alertness than a large mug of coffee in the morning. "Spread Out Your Coffee Breaks" advises one headline.
But that’s not what the study examined.
The researchers tested hourly small doses of caffeine against a placebo, or sugar pill -- not against one large dose. There were only 16 men and no women in the study, another limitation on the results.
But "Caffeine Beats Placebo" isn't such a great headline. I'm not going to change my coffee-drinking habits just yet.
It's Cover the Uninsured Week. Why do we care?
The Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured estimates that U.S. hospitals and doctors will write off $40 billion in care for the country's 44 million uninsured this year. Read more. You think those costs don't get passed on to taxpayers and health insurance policyholders? Go back to sleep.
Here's my story on how these charity write-offs are skyrocketing for Spokane-area hospitals.
Looking for some interesting reading this weekend? The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report has two great articles for science geeks. This one reports there was no causal link to bad beef among the cluster of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease among people who ate at the Garden State Racetrack in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. And this one documents the decline in birth defects after the government mandated that cereal products be fortified with folic acid.
Researchers at Washington State University have documented a threefold increase from the early 1990s in the rate of prescribing antidepressants to depressed teenagers and a twofold increase in the rate of diagnosing depression in teenagers. Read more about the study. Health policy professor David Sclar was the lead researcher.
If it’s clean enough for National Public Radio and the New York Times, it must be clean enough for Health Beat. Of course, I'm talking about the ongoing story of the HIV outbreak that has shut down the porn industry.
Here’s the latest installment. But what about the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation, the group that identified the outbreak before it got worse? Want to know more about them? Want to see the quarantine list of actors who've been asked not to work because they may be infected? Click here.
From the group’s site: "An adult entertainment worker MUST BE TESTED EVERY 30 DAYS. Most producers will not hire you if you do not have a DNA test less than 30 days old. And believe me you do not want to work with anyone with an old test because they could be hiding HIV."
And here’s a New York Times guest editorial on why getting tough on the industry will only drive it underground. It's written by the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation's founder, Sharon Mitchell. She has a plan for getting the industry to start using condoms.
People are more likely to remember to take their blood pressure drugs consistently if the medications are combined into a once-a-day tablet, according to a review of the research by the Cochrane Collaboration. Read more about it at Informed Health Online.
Caffeine-laden soft drinks go hand in hand with high blood pressure in teenagers, a particular problem for blacks, according to a study of 159 teens published in the May issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.
"For adolescents, especially African American adolescents, caffeine intake may increase blood pressure and thereby increase the risk of hypertension," the Medical College of Georgia researchers write. "Alternatively, caffeinated drink consumption may be a marker for dietary and lifestyle practices that together influence blood pressure."
The researchers call for -- say it with me now -- more research on the topic.
