Around the Mediverse: July 17, 2010

Fun tidbits, health-related and otherwise, from around the ‘tubes:

• How do the media deal with new research?  How should the media, or anyone else for that matter, interpret new research?  Unfortunately, the New York times only devotes a couple of paragraphs to this first question, but even that is enough to illuminate the complex web of incentives facing those in the science communications industry, and what it means for the science coverage that you see.  A blogger at Foreign Policy provides some useful advice in response to the second question.

• The Placebo Journal Blog takes on a proposal to save family practice… by extending the residency to 4 years from 3 (in contrast, FP residency in Canada is 2 years).  The comments are harsher than the post itself.  A family practitioner blogging at Better Health gives an example of how opting out of Medicare can be win-win for the doctor and the patient.  This strikes me as a better option than an extended residency.  Even if primary care can be saved, it probably won’t happen soon enough to stave off what could be a massive increase in Emergency Department utilization by newly insured patients as a result of the PPACA.

• File these under “overutilization” for sure:  Dinosaur accuses the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology of “usurping” primary care’s scope of practice with new guidelines recommending OB/GYN visits for younger teenagers; MD Whistleblower blows the whistle on various “pre-emptive” CT scans that are being advertised to patients despite the fact that they don’t do much good for anyone.

• Science-Based Medicine writes a rebuttal to a Slate piece linked to in the last edition of AtM:  Why Big Pharma should not buy your doctor lunch.  SBM also featured some well-written commentary about new CMS head Don Berwick, touching on his lax attitude towards pseudoscience, and the Central Berwick Paradox of supporting unlimited patient choice and top-down government rationing.  Or something like that.

• Via EconThoughts and Megan McArdle, we find a story in the WSJ describing how some unions hire non-union labour to staff their picket lines.  Delicious.  Less delicious is the story told by House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D-Wis) of how the White House suggested paying for spending on teachers by cutting food stamp benefits.  Does anybody remember who the largest donors to federal Democrats are?  I’m having trouble, but I don’t think it’s food stamp recipients.

• TJIC and Coyote Blog talk about “big picture jobs,” adding real value through real work, and what Scott Greenfield would call the “Slackoisie” that is much of my generation (I hope not to fall in with that crowd).  We have critiques of  recent NY Times letter-writer Arielle Eirienne, Washington Post interviewee “little-miss-altruist Beth Hanley,” and “big-picture jobs” and the people who think they should have one.  They use lots of harsh words (well, TJIC does), but honestly… they’re right, painful as it may be for some of my contemporaries (heck, a number of my former classmates) to acknowledge.

• Let’s talk safety.  It’s important, right?  Important enough to flex some muscle and shut down a business just for the hell of it?  Coyote finds that some agencies would say “yes” to that.  Toyota and the NHTSA, in a move that didn’t surprise those who cared to think about the issue, announced that virtually all of the so-called “sudden acceleration” issues are attributable to driver error “pedal misapplication.” Whoops.  Coyote asks “how safe is safe enough” in the context of dioxin, pointing out that new EPA efforts at regulation are probably superfluous, as is their existing safety standard.  Lastly, can we afford to hire government employees to supervise children’s dietary intake?  What’s scary is that there are people out there who take the question seriously.

• Doctors aren’t the only ones who deal with emergencies.  There is such a thing as a legal emergency as well.  Why not regulate emergency legal services in the same we that we do emergency medical care?  Of course, like physicians, sometimes lawyers can be breathtakingly, hilariously incompetent.

• Economic mismanagement was a common theme this past week.  From EconThoughts we have Obama’s Dirty Dozen; InsureBlog explains how his state is implementing the PPACA’s high-risk pool provision (not very well, it seems).  Coyote explains why a government program’s popularity is a terrible metric by which to judge it, just as high corporate profits can sometimes spell bad news for the larger economy.

• Ending on a lighter note, we have an interpretation of Toy Story 3 as a libertarian-inspired parable, and an animation of an orthopedist consulting with an anesthesiologist.  “There is a fracture.  I need to fix it.“  Hilarious.