We all know that obesity is a huge and growing (no puns intended) problem in the U.S. and most other developed countries.
The proven harmful consequences of obesity to the individual and the public health, as well as to the national treasuries, are devastating. The solutions are both simple and complex.
For most adults who are of normal weight (BMI under 25), simply maintain your normal weight. If you are overweight (BMI …
Only rarely does an experienced editor get a spine tingle from a new paper. For the first time ever, today, I predict that a Nobel Prize for medicine will be awarded to J. Martin Brown, DPhil, Oxford, a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Professor Brown and his colleagues have discovered and reported a fundamentally new approach to the treatment of solid tumors, beginning with the devastating glioblastoma multiforme.
Here is …
First, relevant disclosures: I work half-time as editor-at-large at MedPage Today in Little Falls, N.J., and I work half-time as editor-in-chief of Cancer Commons from CollabRx in Palo Alto.
Many of you know that I was the editor at JAMA for 17 years and at Medscape for 10 years. You also know that I have been a strong advocate for evidence-based medicine (EBM) for decades and have trumpeted the large randomized …
In early June, 2010, MedPage Today posted a survey question asking readers to identify the primary driver of rising healthcare costs.
More than 1,200 readers responded by answering: 24%, Increased insurance premiums; 22%, New technology; 22%, Malpractice costs; 12%, Drug costs; 3% Increased physician payment; Other — 16%.
I voted “Other.” This survey, like most, misses the main point. It is the decisions of patients and physicians that are the principal drivers …
Death is not the enemy. We all die.
The enemies of patients and physicians are premature death, disease, disability, pain, human suffering.
I believe that all people deserve a death with dignity and without pain. Palliative care is the right mode for as many as 80% of all Americans who will die of chronic progressive incurable diseases. Eighty percent of those state that they do not want to die in a hospital …
While I was still the editor of JAMA, I was in Boston in January, 1997, to do my regular teaching at Harvard. I dropped in to see my friend Jerry Kassirer, the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. Little did I know that Jerry was in the midst of a firestorm of protest for his just-published editorial called “Federal Foolishness and Marijuana.” Jerry told me that he received …
In the Journal of the American Medical Association on May 15, 1991, in our first of many theme issues dedicated to “Caring for the uninsured and underinsured,” I wrote: “An aura of inevitability is upon us. It is no longer acceptable morally, ethically, or economically for so many of our people to be medically uninsured or seriously underinsured. We can solve this problem. We have the knowledge and the resources, …
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