Technically, all Judy Sweet needs is a blood pressure test. In most doctors’ offices, this would be an in-and-out visit. Sweet’s doctor, however, never rushes her patients. Mary Elizabeth Sokach is a primary-care provider based in Exeter Township, a rural Pennsylvania community about 15 miles west of Scranton. When Sokach walks into the room, she greets Sweet like an old friend, then examines her closely. She asks when Sweet last had an eye exam. (“She’s a phenomenal artist, so we have to keep her hands and her vision going,” explains Sokach.) And she talks to Sweet about sleep and ... Read More
Placebo Effect Stronger Than We Thought?
January 4, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
In July 2001, the Amgen Corporation announced the failure, in a second-stage clinical trial, of an experimental drug to treat Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative illness that affects nerve cells in the brain. Such a failure was hardly unusual; only a minority of the drugs that undergo trials make it to the marketplace. But for Perry Cohen, who had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s several years before, at age 50, the announcement brought both surprise and disappointment. Cohen, an MIT-trained PhD who had spent decades advising health-care organizations on how to evaluate medical care, had ... Read More
Cohen’s Nonprofit Helps Hospitals Go Green
December 27, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Gary Cohen is not a doctor or a nurse. He has never worked in a hospital, and, he admits, he thinks hospitals are kind of scary, in part because both of his parents died in one. But when the Environmental Protection Agency released a draft report in the mid-1990s, citing hospital incinerators as the country's No. 1 source of carcinogenic dioxin emissions, Cohen, a longtime environmental activist, simply couldn't abide the irony. How could the industry that existed to heal people be doing so much harm? In 1996, he and colleague Charlotte Brody founded the nonprofit Health Care Without Harm, ... Read More
Healthier Hospital Food — For Us and the Earth
December 27, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Lucia Sayre is not a doctor, although she helms the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Before taking that post as the group’s co-director and only full-time employee, Sayre lived and worked on the Arizona-Mexico border. For two decades, she was involved in community development, and she met many fourth- and fifth-generation farmers with “food in their blood.” But when they came to the United States, there was no local agriculture available to these people. “I got really interested in the food system and how unhealthy it is in this country,” ... Read More
For Dying Cancer Patients, Geography is Destiny
November 16, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
For many older Americans with advanced and incurable cancer, where and how they die — at home with their family or sedated in an ICU with a tube down their throat — may not be based on their final preferences and wishes, but on customs, care patterns, and even the financial incentives and number of beds in the hospital they and their loved ones entrusted with their care. That’s the conclusion of a new addition to the Dartmouth Atlas, a compendium of 20 years of research on how health care usage and practices vary tremendously from one place to another. “The bottom line is the ... Read More
‘House,’ ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Violate Codes of Conduct?
June 25, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Next time the brilliant Dr. House resuscitates a patient using a pair of tweezers, household twine and the foil from a chewing gum wrapper, you're right to be skeptical. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics analyzed a full season of two hugely popular medical shows — ABC's Grey's Anatomy and Fox's House — and discovered that the dramas were "rife" with incidents that violated professional codes of conduct. Analyzing the second seasons of the shows, researcher Matthew Czarny pinpointed 179 depictions of bioethical dilemmas, ranging from issues surrounding ... Read More
A New Therapy for America’s Aging Hospitals
July 27, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
As “the U.S. enters the largest [health care] construction program in its history,” the authors of a new report collecting decades of research on “evidence-based [health care] design” say the timing of their study is of critical importance. After decades of add-ons and Band-Aids for America’s aging health facilities, the study published in Health Environments Research & Design Journal reports new hospital construction is projected to exceed $70 billion by 2011. While building age and the emergence of technologies are significant drivers for new construction, hospital ... Read More
Take Two Aspirin and Call Your Architect in the Morning
June 18, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
When the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released its 1999 landmark “To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System,” it reported what had been suspected but not confirmed: Medical errors in the U.S. health delivery system were rampant and occurred at unprecedented levels. The IOM recommended significant overhaul, as “reform around the margins is inadequate to address the ills of the system.” Since that report, the market has taken the relationship between the hospital environment and safety very seriously. So has the government; as of Oct. 1, Medicare will limit reimbursement for a ... Read More
Is Sarbanes-Oxley a Prescription for Hospitals?
April 1, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
Not-for-profit hospitals are exempt from most taxes, and seemingly for good reason — they seek to conduct valuable clinical research and offer care to Americans who can’t afford treatment elsewhere. Recently, though, those noble goals have been called into question, as some hospitals fell victim to the sort of financial scandals that might have made Kenneth Lay blush, and others failed to live up to their charitable missions. Government officials have proposed regulations for hospital boards of directors, hoping that stronger oversight will keep chief executives in check and maintain ... Read More
