Your consumer powers when choosing a hospital
From an August posting by at KevinMD.com
The casual attitude people demonstrate when choosing doctors incurs a steep price. Let’s direct our attention to your consumer powers when choosing a hospital.
The imperative ‘caveat emptor’ (let the buyer beware) carries the most consequence when you purchase health care. When it comes to hiring a hospital’s services, it’s more caveat empty than caveat emptor.
It’s time to impart the same lessons for hospitals as we did for doctors. All hospitals are not the same. Each is its own unique brand. We, a nation of shoppers, are obsessed with brand names that tout their distinctiveness. In reality, most consumer products in any given category are all but indistinguishable from each other. We think we can see the smallest pixel a human brain can process on a video display. We taste the figs and peaches in a $9 bottle of wine. We claim the sensory hyper-acuity possessed by dogs, dolphins and nocturnal predators….
Resources for comparing hospitals
- Hospital Quality Compare (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services)- compares quality of care for certain medical conditions at more than 4,200 hospitals. The site also includes a checklist to help you choose a hospital
- Leapfrog Hospital Ratings - information on this site is derived from hospitals’ voluntary submissions of The Leapfrog Hospital Survey. More about the Leapfrog Group at their About Page
Related articles
- Find the Best Hospital with Medicare’s Hospital Compare Tool [Health] (lifehacker.com)
- Smart Consumers Can Improve Health Care Quality. (victimrights.wordpress.com)
- CMS Updates Medicare.gov Portal With Added Searches and Comparison Information (ducknetweb.blogspot.com)
- New Tools And Initiatives Announced By The Centers For Medicare & Medicaid Services (medicalnewstoday.com)
The entire approach to food based on nutrients is wrong
From an August 2011 article by SHANTANU NUNDY, MD in KevinMD.com
The science of nutrition is changing and not in the way you might expect. After years of “reductionist” thinking — where food has been viewed as the sum of its parts – a call to treat food as food has been sounded. No more poring over nutrition labels to calculate grams of fat or chasing down the latest go-to chemical – be it vitamin E, fish oil or omega-3. Instead we are being asked to call a potato a potato and a piece of steak, well, a piece of steak…
Related articles
- How Does Food Impact Health? (autoimmunephoenix.wordpress.com)
Global Obesity Pandemic – Lancet articles & related articles (including press coverage)
From the 26 August edition of The Lancet
This four-part Series critically examines what we know about the global obesity pandemic: its drivers, its economic and health burden, the physiology behind weight control and maintenance, and what science tells us about the kind of actions that are needed to change our obesogenic environment and reverse the current tsunami of risk factors for chronic diseases in future generations. …
Series Papers**The global obesity pandemic: shaped by global drivers and local environmentsBoyd A Swinburn, Gary Sacks, Kevin D Hall, Klim McPherson, Diane T Finegood, Marjory L Moodie, Steven L GortmakerHealth and economic burden of the projected obesity trends in the USA and the UKY Claire Wang, Klim McPherson, Tim Marsh, Steven L Gortmaker, Martin BrownQuantification of the effect of energy imbalance on bodyweightKevin D Hall, Gary Sacks, Dhruva Chandramohan, Carson C Chow, Y Claire Wang, Steven L Gortmaker, Boyd A SwinburnChanging the future of obesity: science, policy, and actionSteven L Gortmaker, Boyd A Swinburn, David Levy, Rob Carter, Patricia L Mabry, Diane T Finegood, Terry Huang, Tim Marsh, Marjory L Moodie
Related articles
- Half of UK men could be obese by 2030 (guardian.co.uk)
- Government-led efforts targeting eating habits of children needed to curb worldwide obesity epidemic (eurekalert.org)
- The diabetes pandemic: 1 in 4 US adults now has diabetes (casesblog.blogspot.com)
- Obesity deterrents by governments called for (cbc.ca)
- Shocking report says half of Americans will be obese by 2030 (cbsnews.com)
About
This blog presents a sampling of health and medical news and resources for all. Selected articles and resources will hopefully be of general interest but will also encourage further reading through posted references and other links. Currently I am focusing on public health, basic and applied research and very broadly on disease and healthy lifestyle topics.
Several times a month I will post items on international and global health issues. My Peace Corps Liberia experience (1980-81) has formed me as a global citizen in many ways and has challenged me to think of health and other topics in a more holistic manner. (For those wishing to see pictures of a 2009 Friends of Liberia service trip to this West African country, please visit www.fol.org. My photo album is included).
Do you have an informational question in the health/medical area?
Email me at jmflahiff@yahoo.com
I will reply within 48 hours.
This blog is a companion site to my Health and Medical News and Resources Web site with…
- Informational sites and guides
- Links to help from others (as health care providers and support groups)
- Interactive tools (as health calculators and apps)
- Select related news sites and blogs
My professional work experience and education includes over 10 years experience as a medical librarian and a Master’s in Library Science. In my most recent position I enjoyed contributing to our library’s blog, performing in depth literature searches, and collaborating with faculty, staff, students, and the general public.
While I will never be be able to keep up with the universe of current health/medical news,
I subscribe to the following to glean entries for this blog
- Medical News Today, a MediLexicon International daily online health news product
- MedLib-L ,a medical librarian discussion list
- Science Daily – Your source for the latest research news
- A Consumer and Patient Health (CAPHIS) discussion list , by a section of the Medical Library Association (MLA)
- MedlinePlus email updates from the US National Institutes of Health
- Public Health Partners from the National Library of Medicine
- US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) electronic newsletter with updates on the agency’s efforts to “improve the quality, safety, efficiency, and effectiveness of health care for all Americans”
- Krafty (Medical)Librarian,” a collection of writings from Michelle Kraft on items of interest to medical librarians. She tends to write on technology and medical libraries but she also writes about things in general on librarianship, medicine and health”
- Research Buzz, “news about search engines, digital archives, online museums, databases, and other Internet information collections since 1998″
- Library Journal – Breaking News
- librarian.net by librarian consultant Jessamyn West
- The Cornflower, the blog of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine Greater Midwest Region
- DocuTicker with “abstracts from ‘grey literature’: PDF reports published by government agencies, think tanks, NGOs, research institutes and other public interest groups”
- PubMed New and Noteworthy, updates from the largest indexer of biomedical journals in the world
- Free Government Information, a ”place for initiating dialogue and building consensus among the various players (libraries, government agencies, non-profit organizations, researchers, journalists, etc.) who have a stake in the preservation of and perpetual free access to government information”
- Scout Report, a “weekly publication offering a selection of new and newly discovered Internet resources of interest to researchers and educators”
- Latest from Brookings Institute, independent research reports on social and political issues
- KevinMD.com -”Social Media’s leading physician voice”
- EurekAlert-Medicine and Health
