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With the Lower Drug Costs Now Act, we are taking bold action to level the playing field for American patients and taxpayers. This legislation is one that I am proud to have voted for, and the House can be proud to have passed. It is essential to save the lives of Americans and improve our quality of life.
I initially became a trainer in 2002 to help people shape their bodies, to help them look the way they wanted to look. This would reflect the way I was living. I was focusing on the exterior. Then in 2003/4, I had a paradigm shift. I started a business for bariatric patients, pre- and post-gastric bypass.
Because I've been so blessed with a background in nursing and spent so much time with patients at a really intimate, vulnerable time in their lives, the one lesson I've learned is that you never turn down a challenge where you can keep your creative integrity and your heart and soul and your sense of self.
The Food and Drug Administration works to protect the interests of all patients and provide them with reliable information about the potential effects of treatments. But government rules should not stand in the way of potentially lifesaving therapies for those who do not have much time or any other options.
I am a trained hypnotherapist, yes, but it's more like a guided meditation. Most of the people I take under struggle with stress in their lives and have unbalanced sleeping patterns, so what I do enables my patients to regain energy and peacefulness on a subconscious level which affects their conscious mind.
The bulk of my learning - if I may call it such - has come within the past three months, after I became a part of the fragile body of patients who make up an AIDS hospice. Here, surrounded by teams of supportive nurses, attentive doctors, and interns, one gently comes upon his own strengths and shortcomings.
PubMed Central is vital for researchers and the public alike. Only through free access can everyone find out where the cutting edge of research lies. With access to the latest studies, patients and their families have a much-needed piece of the puzzle as they consider treatment options and potential outcomes.
Consider radiology. Technology is going to reduce the use of those machines because doctors aren't going to need to send patients two or three times for radiology. They're going to have access to what the previous specialist took. There's also going to be devices that are coming out that are much less costly.
Epilepsy is a disease in the shadows. Patients are often reluctant to admit their condition - even to close family, friends or co-workers - because there's still a great deal of stigma and mystery surrounding the disease that plagued such historical figures as Julius Caesar, Edgar Allan Poe and Lewis Carroll.
A smartphone links patients' bodies and doctors' computers, which in turn are connected to the Internet, which in turn is connected to any smartphone anywhere. The new devices could put the management of an individual's internal organs in the hands of every hacker, online scammer, and digital vandal on Earth.
You know, cancer is bipartisan. I mean, there are so many people whose lives are touched and changed by cancer that people are willing to work together to find cures, find solutions, make lives better for cancer patients. So I think people put politics aside. This isn't a political thing. This is a life issue.
As a young physician in the mid-'80s, caring for people who had contracted H.I.V., I lost two of my patients to suicide at a time when the virus was doing very little harm to them. I have always thought of them as having been killed by a metaphor, by the burden of secrecy and shame associated with the disease.
Losing so many patients certainly was difficult, but it didn't make me feel like a failure as a physician, because I had learned that there was so much more to being a physician than curing illness. That's not the most important thing we do. The most important thing we do is enter into the suffering of others.
Cancer has taught me a lot of things. Maybe it is the best thing that has happened to me. I can't say right now, but maybe some years down the line, I would realise. When I was taking chemotherapy, there were a lot of elderly patients, and that would inspire me. I thought, 'If they can be cured, why can't I be?'
Most drugs sold in the U.S. are produced outside of the country, and if we can ensure supply-chain safety for these drugs, introducing more of them to the market quicker could mean major differences in the price of drugs, quality of life for patients, and for some Americans the difference between life and death.
Once we as doctors are entrusted with the well-being of our patients and their children, it is our duty to take action, to be selfless, and fulfill our obligation to the service of others. I did so willingly, and it brought me great joy throughout my professional career. However, I always had a desire to do more.
People and organizations other than doctors increasingly are assuming power to decide which medications to prescribe or procedures to undertake. More and more, decisions about personal healthcare are no longer made by the treating physicians in consultation with their patients, and based on the doctors' expertise.
Human bodies are designed for regular physical activity. The sedentary nature of much of modern life probably plays a significant role in the epidemic incidence of depression today. Many studies show that depressed patients who stick to a regimen of aerobic exercise improve as much as those treated with medication.
When I taught writing classes to psychiatric patients, I met people whose stories of manic highs and immobilizing lows appeared to be textbook descriptions of classic bipolar disorder. I met other patients who had been diagnosed with myriad disorders. No doctor seemed to agree about what they actually suffered from.
I do not like to work with patients who are in love. Perhaps it is because of envy - I, too, crave enchantment. Perhaps it is because love and psychotherapy are fundamentally incompatible. The good therapist fights darkness and seeks illumination, while romantic love is sustained by mystery and crumbles upon inspection.
One of the jewels in the crown of Labour's time in office was the rescue of the National Health Service. As the Commonwealth Fund, the London School of Economics and the Nuffield Foundation have all shown, health reforms as well as additional investment were essential to improved outcomes, especially for poorer patients.
Operating-room errors hold a special terror for patients, if only because they seem like the most avoidable kind of complications. The occasional horror stories of patients who have the wrong leg removed or the wrong knee replaced generate the most headlines, as do tales of patients whose identities are mixed up entirely.
What I learned from my work as a physician is that even with the most complicated patients, the most complicated problems, you've got to look hard to find every piece of data and evidence that you can to improve your decision-making. Medicine has taught me to be very much evidence-based and data-driven in making decisions.
Because the biological mechanisms that affect our health and well-being are so dynamic, when people change their diet and lifestyle, they usually feel so much better, so quickly; it reframes the reason for changing from fear of dying to joy of living. Also, the support that patients give each other is a powerful motivator.
Safe care saves lives and saves money. Adverse events like high levels of infection, blood clots or falls in hospital, emergency readmissions and pressure sores cost the NHS billions of pounds every year. There is a serious human cost, too, with patients ending up injured, or even dead. Most are avoidable with the right care.
The vast majority of people who speak to me say they have had brilliant care. When they are critical, their concern tends not to be directed at the medical side but the ancillary things that surround it, such as helping patients to eat meals, cleanliness, and making sure that when patients have a problem, they are listened to.
Originally, I was in high school, and I was studying biology, and I got really interested in the field of medicine. And then, I got a lot of early exposure to it because my father's a physician, and I saw the relationship that he had with his patients, and it was something that drew my attention to how wonderful the field was.
I think doctors are really suffering now. They're suffering in the sense that they feel torn between serving their patients in the best way they can and dealing with all of requirements of the insurance companies and the HMOs and the hassles and the paper work and the increasing pressures to do less and less for their patients.
All of us know that Messi cannot win alone, except for the fanatics or the mental patients who put in doubt Messi's talents, saying that he is a bottler, that he feels nothing for Argentina, that he doesn't sing the anthem, that he goes to the bathroom 50 times before a game. Those are things that are said to make an impression.
Smallpox can be personally devastating. After a 14-day incubation period, patients experience high fevers, headaches, and sometimes severe abdominal pain. A rash resembling chicken pox appears in the mouth and throat, face, and forearms, and spreads to the trunk and legs. As patients recover, scabs break and pitted scars appear.
In the case of health information, I spent twenty-five years practicing medicine, and I was all too familiar with the fact that information wasn't properly shared, so I wouldn't know exactly what was in the hospital records; patients would be lost. Computerization gives the opportunity to actually get the information much better.
When the FDA forces an old drug off the market, patients have very little say in the matter. Patients have even less of a say when the FDA chooses not to approve a new drug. Instead, we are supposed to rely on the FDA's judgment and be grateful. But can the FDA really make a choice that is appropriate for everyone? Of course not.
Today we have a health insurance industry where the first and foremost goal is to maximize profits for shareholders and CEOs, not to cover patients who have fallen ill or to compensate doctors and hospitals for their services. It is an industry that is increasingly concentrated and where Americans are paying more to receive less.
I don't know what has caused this reawakening in academia. Obama? The GOP's assaults on science and on patients? Jon Stewart? I'm not at all sure. I just know I don't feel nearly as alone in academia as I used to. I'm feeling increasingly surrounded by fellow Ph.D.'s and by M.D.'s who seem to be taking a lot of things personally.
I worked in Syria on the front lines, and you hear the plane, you hear the shell is dropping, you realize it's not on you - 'Good' - and then you see the patients coming in and take care of them. And then you have down time. With Ebola, it seems there's no down time. It seems you're always at the front line; you're always exposed.
We want combination solutions at the state level, at the local level - whether we've learned from the Chinese about creating what we've been calling COVID wards - creating the ability to actually care for larger numbers of clients and patients in a more concentrated way which allows more oversights so we could really track patients.
Physicians today, as human beings, are not exempt from the perverse economic pressures created by fee-for-service regimes to see more patients for shorter appointments and order more tests and procedures. If the incentives were changed to pay to foster better health outcomes, I am convinced physician behavior would change over time.
Supported by digital data, new data-driven tools, and payment policies that reward improving the quality and value of care, doctors, hospitals, patients, and entrepreneurs across the nation are demonstrating that smarter, better, more accessible, and more proactive care is the best way to improve quality and control health care costs.
There's already a lot of active research going on using the Crispr technology to fix diseases like Duchenne muscular dystrophy or cystic fibrosis or Huntington's disease. They're all diseases that have known genetic causes, and we now have the technology that can repair those mutations to provide, we hope, patients with a normal life.
I always remind my team to take a step back and ask themselves, 'Why are we doing this?' For us, 100% of the time, it is to better serve our patients, consumers, and customers. This is a great question to come back to when your team is losing focus; it reduces stress and mobilizes people to get excited about the collective possibility.
Part of what motivated my writing was anger. I was angry that the daily misery of doctors, nurses, and patients was being trivialised into soap opera. We were made to feel bad because we were not perfect like our television counterparts. We were resentful that our patients did not get better as quickly as they did on telly - or at all.
If you sequence a cancerous tumor, you should be able to tailor the therapy according to the root cause of the cancer. But it has taken so long to do the sequencing - which also requires time to prepare the samples and interpret the deluge of data that comes out - that the patients are already undergoing therapy by the process if over.
Ever since Katrina, there has been a proliferation of efforts at the state level and among hospital administrators to come up with guidelines that would help professionals stuck in a situation like this to prioritize patients. These are questions of values much more than they are of medicine or nursing. They're the province of everybody.
Diversity is not a politically correct idea. Diversity in a boardroom or in a Parliament means that you just have different minds, different life experience, different ways of thinking about patients or customers or voters so that when you bring that intellect, you look at opportunity and risk, and then you have it in much better balance.
I work at a non-profit called ALS Worldwide, where we work with ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig's disease) patients and families. It is often heavy work, but I'm grateful to be able to contribute to the ALS community. I'm constantly learning about science and medicine, and I have the honor of corresponding with patients throughout the world.
The development of a strategic plan for cancer prevention in medical schools that is supported by all stakeholders - including the medical community, government, the insurance industry, cancer advocacy groups and all those dedicated to cancer prevention - will be the key to inspiring patients to live lifestyles that will decrease cancer risk.
The importance in what we're seeing in countries around the world is a poorly regulated and poorly functioning private sector using irrational and ineffective medications that result in the emergence of drug-resistance tuberculosis. What we've done is begun a program to rapidly improve infection control in places that are treating TB patients.
In 2001, a systematic review of five studies revealed that roughly half of all chiropractic patients experience temporary adverse effects, such as pain, numbness, stiffness, dizziness and headaches. These are relatively minor effects, but the frequency is very high, and this has to be weighed against the limited benefit offered by chiropractors.
Most of the people who make decisions about global health are in the U.S. and Western Europe. There, the mental health care system is dominated by highly trained, expensive professionals in big hospitals, who often see patients over long periods of time. This simply can't be done in rural Africa or India. Who the hell can afford that kind of care?
Few years ago when I visited a palliative care centre in Chennai for the first time, it completely moved me. It's an emotionally draining experience. I saw and met patients who were abandoned by their families, and there is complete sense of hopelessness. Ever since, I have been a supporter for the need for funding and awareness of palliative care.