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How are American doctors fighting medical tourism trend?
Cardiologist DrRich’s latest post details the concern the American College of Surgeons have for the burgeoning medical tourism industry, and how they are using malpractice as a reason not to travel overseas for your procedure.
“Indeed, the potential difficulty in suing foreign doctors appears to be the chief differentiator, [...]

By MAGGIE MAHAR Maggie Mahar is an award winning journalist and author. A frequent contributor to THCB, her work has appeared in Barron’s and Institutional Investor. She is the author of Money-Driven medicine: The Real Reason Why healthcare costs so…

Is it ever ok for a hospitalist to be the primary physician in post-op cases?
The answer is no, but as The Happy Hospitalist reports, it’s happening in some cases.
He details an instance where a hospitalist program is being asked by an orthopedic surgeon to provide care for his post-op cases, with the surgeon only coming [...]

Too much weight gain during pregnancy can be unhealthy, particularly for women who are overweight or obese when they become pregnant. And as the rate of obesity has grown in the U.S., so have questions about how much weight women should gain during pregnancy.
The Institute of Medicine put out some long-awaited guidelines yesterday to [...]

At what point does aesthetics trump function?
Over at Better Health, Val Jones talks about cases where land mines blow off hands, necessitating the so-called Krukenberg operation, which recreates a pincer grasp in the hands.
The result looks like this:

It’s a remarkable procedure. But, as Val notes, not everyone may want this operation, as some may [...]

The FDA versus Cheeros furor is getting some blogosphere play.
Internist Matthew Mintz analyzes the claim that Cheerios lowers cholesterol by 4 percent. Big deal, he says. “The problem is that even though Cheerios may lower your cholesterol by 4 percent, this probably has no impact on your risk for heart attack or stroke [...]

Alzheimer’s is a disease of the very old: While only 5% of people between 65 and 74 have the disease, nearly half of those who are over 85 have it.
So we were interested in a study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine that looked at Alzheimer’s, aging and the brain.
Researchers in [...]

Stanford’s Abraham Verghese challenges readers to solve his medical riddle, without using Google.
These exercises, when thought through, offer the student the opportunity to “formulate hypotheses, go to the book, research and eliminate possibilities . . . and come to the answer,” and can be a valuable learning experience.
But with the dawn of Google, many arcane [...]

by WILLIAM BESTERMANN, MD The puzzle of improving care and reducing costs in American medicine and in vascular conditions (that is, diseases associated with blood vessel metabolism) in particular – these are responsible for 60 percent of all cost -…

By MAGGIE MAHAR At last, Money-Driven Medicine is finished. This 90-minute documentary was produced by Alex Gibney, best known for his 2005 film, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and his 2007 Academy Award Winning documentary, Taxi to the…