‘Pill Mill’ series turns focus on rogue doctors
The Palm Beach Post’s Michael LaForgia has put together a spicy profile of rogue Florida pain management doctors.
While Florida leaders are calling for laws that ban felons from running pain management clinics, some authorities are pointing to rogue doctors as a serious problem. “Many pain management doctors prescribe drugs responsibly and offer needed care, but authorities say a subset among them is more interested in making money than in easing pain.”
Photo by Ben Sutherland via Flickr
LaForgia writes that some pain clinic doctors are far from the image of benevolent caretakers: “They drive expensive cars, manage off-shore corporations and make multimillion-dollar deals — and sometimes break the rules of the state Board of Medicine.”
A review of records found that a quarter of the 60 pain management practitioners in Palm Beach County have been cited for wrongdoing by the state. A third of them have degrees from foreign medical schools, which often have lower standards than medical schools in the United States.
The story is the latest in the Post’s “Pill Mill” series, about how “lax regulations have made Florida a pipeline for addicts and drug dealers seeking to obtain addictive painkillers such as OxyContin and hydrocodone.”
Related
- Gina Barton: State oversight of health professionals
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Parikh: Celebs’ medical advice should be tempered
Filed under: Health journalism, Hot Health Headline
Writing for Slate, Rahul Parikh chronicles the damage done by medical advice-dispensing celebrities then, acknowledging their influence and staying power, argues that physicians need to learn to work with these prominent folks and their pet causes.
In a sobering reminder of the line between journalism and celebrity advocacy, Parikh holds up colonoscopy advocate and news anchor Katie Couric as an example of the positives and negatives of celebrities with health-related causes.
Couric partners with doctors instead of undermining them like anti-establishment heroes Jenny McCarthy and Suzanne Somers, but she doesn’t disclose potential colonscopy risks or alternatives to the invasive procedure. Parikh also points out that celebrity sound bites don’t come with the high-speed, stacatto renditions of the small print that are required for other medical advertising, which leaves folks with a one-sided impression of the treatment.
J-S: No reform measure will get majority support
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s Guy Boulton breaks down polling data and political strategy to demonstrate that, while a large majority of Wisconsin residents acknowledge that the health system is broken, few are willing to take the steps necessary to fix it. The majority opposes higher taxes and changes to their employer-provided plans, even if it will help those who currently have no insurance.
Boulton uses local and national statistics to produce a well-rounded picture of the logistical obstacles facing health care reform efforts.
One of the key sticking points seems to be that people do not want to be told that some things are not medically necessary. “And talk of making the system more efficient by reducing unneeded care inevitably invites cries of ‘rationing.’”
Another obstacle – one that journalists need to be aware of – is that, while health care affects everyone, “relatively very few people have much reason to be extremely well informed about the mechanics of health care – the financing of health care, the delivery system,” according to Mark Peterson, a political science professor at UCLA and a faculty associate of its Center for Health Policy Research.
(Hat tip to Carol Gentry at Health News Florida)
BMJ wants raw data for all drug trials to be shared
Filed under: Hot Health Headline, Pharmaceuticals, Public records
Under the headline “We want raw data, now,” BMJ editor Fiona Godlee recounts the story of how BMJ had to pressure a drug company into releasing full study reports verifying their claims as to the effectiveness of oseltamivir (Tamiflu).
Godlee says that researchers updating their Cochrane review of the drug “failed to verify claims, based on an analysis of 10 drug company trials, that oseltamivir reduced the risk of complications in healthy adults with influenza. These claims have formed a key part of decisions to stockpile the drug and make it widely available.”
Only after Roche was questioned by the BMJ and Channel 4 News did the manufacturer commit to making “full study reports” available. Godlee says that some questions remain, including how patients were recruited and why some neuropsychiatric adverse events were not reported.
Godlee argues that “it can’t be right that the public should have to rely on detective work by academics and journalists to patch together the evidence for such a widely prescribed drug,” saying that “Individual patient data from all trials of drugs should be readily available for scientific scrutiny.”
HHS releases FOIA report in less-than-ideal format
Bob Garfield of WNYC’s “On the Media” talked to John Wonderlich, policy director at the Sunlight Foundation, about last week’s announcement of the Open Government Directive.
Wonderlich says the initiative “is the administration making a real commitment to systemic change within the government.” He also brings up the issue of how information will be made available, pointing out that spreadsheets and datasets are more valuable than paper records to journalists as well as other businesses.
He points out that government agencies report each year on how well they are responding to Freedom of Information Act requests and says that last week – for the first time – the Department of Justice released that information for 2008 in spreadsheets.
Unfortunately that’s not quite the case. The reports from most nearly all of the departments are in spreadsheet form but a few, including the report from the Department of Health and Human Services, are in other formats that may be more difficult to analyze.
There is, however, a bit of good news. The 2007 report from HHS showed that there were more than 28,000 pending requests. The agency has made an effort to reduce its backlog and the 2008 tally is just more than 19,000.
GAO: Flu-fighting plan needs better measures
The United States Government Accountability Office today released the catchily titled “Monitoring and Assessing the Status of the National Pandemic Implementation Plan Needs Improvement” report. See the highlights here.
It does not specifically address the response to the H1N1 pandemic but instead reviews compliance with the Homeland Security Council’s 2006 “Implementation Plan for the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza.” The GAO analyzed 60 randomly selected action items from the 324 recommended in the report and sought to measure both how the completion of those items was monitored and how many had actually been completed.
The GAO found that while the Homeland Security Council had reported that the majority of the action items were complete in 2008, it was “difficult to determine the actual status of some of the 49 designated as complete.” To rectify this, the GAO recommended that “future progress reports would benefit from using measures of performance that are more consistent with the action items’ descriptions.”
Corporate clinics scored scarce H1N1 shots
USA Today’s Alison Young reviewed state H1N1 vaccine distribution information from Florida, Texas and Georgia, finding that “When the swine flu vaccine was most scarce, health officials gave thousands of doses to corporate clinics at Walt Disney World, Toyota, defense contractors, oil companies and cruise lines.”
Young is working on getting the same data for New York and California. The officials Young talked to stressed that they were doing their best to distribute vaccines fairly, but Young quoted legislators and activists who questioned state health department’s ability to ensure that, once vaccines were given to corporations, they were delivered to the folks who needed them most.
Petit: Less variety seen in science news
The Poynter Insitute’s Mallary Jean Tenore writes about the disappearing science beat.
She talks to Natalie Angier, who writes about various science-related topics for The News York Times. Tenore writes that Angier is struggling with many of the questions that other reporters are asking, including how news organizations can continue to cover science with few resources.
Tenore also talks to Charles Petit of the Knight Science Journalism Tracker; NASW President Mariette DiChristina, editor of Scientific American; and David Perlman, the science editor at the San Francisco Chronicle.
Petit points to The Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer as outlets that are “doing a good job of reporting on complicated scientific developments.”
Star-Tribune looks into fatal falls in nursing homes
Minneapolis Star-Tribune reporters Glenn Howatt and Pam Louwagie analyzed death certificates and found that about 1,000 Minnesota deaths between 2002 and 2008 were related to falls in nursing homes. The duo discovered that state programs have done little to reduce the number of falling deaths, and that oversight is lacking throughout the system.
Less than 10 percent of fall-related deaths in nursing homes are fully investigated by the Minnesota Department of Health, which is charged with monitoring nursing home care. Usually nursing homes themselves are left to privately probe the cause of fatal falls on their premises. State regulators review those findings, but sometimes don’t do more. Even when regulators discover that a mistake led to a resident’s death, they often do not cite nursing homes for violations of state and federal regulations.
Employees interviewed by the reporters pointed to chronic understaffing (and inadequate training) as a primary cause of the falling deaths, as residents are sometimes left unattended for long periods and response times can lag.
A sidebar offers some insight on how the story was reported.
More than 22,000 inmates are HIV-positive
Poynter’s Al Tompkins spotted a new U.S. Department of Justice report (PDF) on HIV in American prisons. Among other things, the report finds 22,000 HIV-positive inmates, a number which Tompkins points out may be even higher because fewer than half of American states test every inmate that comes through their doors. About 5,672 prisoners have confirmed AIDS, a disease whose complications killed 130 inmates in 2007, the most recent year for which numbers are available.
Here’s Tompkins quoting some particularly interesting numbers from DOJ:
The Justice Department said just three states account for 46 percent of all of the HIV cases in state prisons:
“Florida (3,626), New York (3,500) and Texas (2,450) reported the largest number of HIV/AIDS cases. While these three states account for 24 percent of the total state custody population, together they account for 46 percent of HIV/AIDS cases in state prison. New York continues to report large decreases (down 450) in the number of HIV/AIDS cases. Notable increases between 2007 and 2008 were in California (up 246), Missouri (up 169) and Florida (up 166).
The report breaks down how many HIV cases are in each state, by gender, how manyAIDS-related deaths were in each state and the circumstances under which inmates were tested.
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Awards for Excellence in Health Care JournalismDeadline: Feb. 3
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- Investigate health professionals and the boards that regulate them
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