June - 2015

The Great Myth: Why Health Care Reform is Failing both Patients and Medicare

A Novel Way to Present Health Information

Deception about Dementia: Why Early Detection can be Dangerous

Curing Medicare to be republished by Cornell University Press in 2016

Cancer screening: how conventional wisdom, quality indicators, and payment incentive equals poor ou

Rat Poison in the Nursing Home

PPI Use and Heart Attacks: Really?

The Real Value of Primary Care

The CDC and diseases of the elderly: Less factual than advertised

Baltimore Sun Op Ed Post

Which docs get money from drug companies and why it matters.

Under the ACA’s Open Payment policy, CMS will now be publishing reports of payments to physicians from drug companies. This is slated to start on June 30th. Log onto the CMS site to check out who and how much money the drug companies are paying. That site is: http://www.cms.gov/openpayments. Why is this important? We know that medicines are over-prescribed in this country, often resulting in high cost and poor outcome. Similarly, drug companies very often deceptively r

PPI Use and Heart Attacks: Really?

SEE EDITORIAL IN THE BALTIMORE SUN. Recently the front page of virtually every major publication proclaimed that medicines used to treat acid reflux (proton pump inhibitors, or ppi’s) may cause heart attacks. Using “mined data” by scouring electronic medical records, researchers determined that use of ppi’s increase people’s risk of getting a heart attack by 16%. That day and the next, my email was pummeled by patients and families wondering if they should stop their prilos