Review: Doctors experimented on healthy people
Filed under: Government, Hot Health Headline, Member news
The Associated Press’ Mike Stobbe found more than 40 instances of doctors making patients sick for the sake of experimentation throughout U.S. history. Last fall’s government apology for doctors infecting Guatemala prisoners with syphilis 65 years ago sparked the review.
Stobbe, a member of AHCJ and a past board member, found healthy people were infected with malaria, Asian flu, gonorrhea, hepatitis and even a deadly stomach bug for the sake of broadening knowledge. Doctors violated the fundamental medical principle to “first do no harm.” Stobbe points out:
Attitudes about medical research were different then. Infectious diseases killed many more people years ago, and doctors worked urgently to invent and test cures. Many prominent researchers felt it was legitimate to experiment on people who did not have full rights in society - people like prisoners, mental patients, poor blacks. It was an attitude in some ways similar to that of Nazi doctors experimenting on Jews.
Disturbingly, some of these stories were never covered in the media.
Resource is a fact book on older Americans
The latest version of “Profile of Older Americans: 2010,” published by the HHS Administration on Aging is available.
AHCJ member Eileen Beal, an independent journalist based in Cleveland, recommends the resource as “a great little booklet of facts and data on older Americans: health, income status, marriage status, etc.” She says it is something that reporters interested in Medicare/Medicaid and senior health care issues will want to have.
AHCJ members: What resources have you come across that your fellow journalists will find useful? Let us know in the comments below.
Fact-checking Pawlenty’s health reform claims
In some parts of the country, health care-related posturing for the 2012 election is already in full swing. Over at CJR.org, AHCJ Immediate Past President Trudy Lieberman applauds a forceful bit of health care reform fact-checking by Minnesota Public Radio reporter Lorna Benson. In her piece, Benson carefully picks apart claims made by former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty as he touts his health reform record as a key piece of his 2012 presidential campaign.
Pawlenty’s two big health talking points are his “baskets of care,” or bundled payments for certain procedures, and his pay-for-performance plan. While both sound promising on paper, Benson found that some gaping holes had opened up as soon as the rubber met the road. See Benson’s full piece for the details of how any real change has been difficult to track or, indeed, even to detect at all.
Family writes about son’s schizophrenia
NPR’s All Things Considered featured the story of Henry Cockburn and his father, British journalist Patrick Cockburn. While the father was reporting in Afghanistan in February 2002, he learned in a shocking phone call that his son nearly drowned when he took a swim in the icy waters of England’s Newhaven Estuary. Henry was admitted to a mental hospital and diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Nearly 10 years later, after hospitalization and many medications, Henry is living on his own and the two have written “Henry’s Demons: Living With Schizophrenia, a Father and Son’s Story.” The book features alternating chapters written by Patrick, Henry and Jan Cockburn about coping with the diagnosis and Henry’s experiences in mental hospitals.
Allen wins Goldsmith Award, joins ProPublica
Marshall Allen, an award-winning AHCJ member, is joining ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative news organization based in New York.
Allen has been a health reporter at the Las Vegas Sun, where he most recently wrote about preventable errors in hospitals, for which he and Alex Richards just received the 2011 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.
Marshall Allen
Allen is a member of the 2010-11 class of AHCJ Media Fellowships on Health Performance with a focus on exploring whether transparency about hospital quality improves the quality of care for patients. In 2009, he was an AHCJ-CDC Health Journalism Fellow.
He won second place in beat reporting in the 2007 Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism. In 2008, he took third place in the medium newspaper category and second place in the limited report category. In the 2009 awards, he won first place in the beat reporting category.
Allen, who serves on AHCJ’s Finance and Development Committee, has contributed tip sheets and articles to the organization’s resources, including:
- Indentured servants: Foreign-born doctors exploited by U.S. physicians
- Death in Sin City: Analyzing the CDC’s mortality database
- DocumentCloud opens a window into inspection reports for readers
Navigators work to keep patients from falling through cracks
Filed under: Hot Health Headline, Nursing, Public health
Patient navigators - “like the air traffic controllers in health care” - captured the attention of Pamela Fayerman of the Vancouver Sun.
Fayerman explains that patient navigators are specially trained health care providers who help patients get access to care and services they need, serve as liaisons between patients and doctors and generally ensure patients don’t fall through the cracks of a complex health care system.
Fayerman’s five-day, multiplatform series on patient navigators was published last week and is a comprehensive look at this relatively new practice being applied to Canadian patients. She explores the roots of patient navigation in Harlem and goes on to document the evolution in Canada over the past decade.
In a story about one patient, Fayerman shows how the role of a navigator in getting efficient treatment, follow up and having a point of contact got the patient into the hospital for triple bypass surgery before she had a heart attack and sustained damage to her heart.
Other stories look at how navigators bring a culturally sensitive approach to treating members of the aboriginal community, as well as the unwillingness of Canadians to pay out of pocket for navigators, but:
In the U.S., where people are used to paying for health care, navigators are becoming more and more common - in both insured and non-insured settings and at for-profit and non-profit hospitals.
Fayerman, who used a $20,000 grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, visited five provinces and 12 cities over eight months, interviewing nurse and other navigators, their patients and health system leaders. She explains why the series is important and how patients can be their own navigators.
Were journalists ‘fabulously naïve’ about human genome?
As Tinker Ready reported on the Nature Network’s Boston Blog, the luminaries gathered for Harvard’s panel on the 10-year anniversary of mapping the human genome, particularly the Broad Institute’s Eric Lander, had some strong opinions on media coverage of the event. Here’s Ready’s description of the spiciest bit:
Lander blamed the press for unrealistically high expectation for the human genome.
… Lander said that expectations for the impact of the research were “fabulously naïve. Journalists wrote about how we were going to have drugs for all these disease in the next decade. Somebody was smoking something. This was just nuts.”
The next day, on her Boston Health News blog, Ready revisited that particular quote for a bit of fact-checking. She went back to initial reports from The New York Times and USA Today, and tried to substantiate the claims of Lander, the lead author who himself wrote, at the time, that “The scientific work will have profound long-term consequences for medicine.”
Without spoiling Ready’s post, I’ll just say she found some examples of restrained, responsible journalism. Were there a few hyperbolic quotes? Yes. But they came from scientists.
NYT’s health editor takes over the science section
Barbara Strauch, who has been the deputy science editor charged with coordinating The New York Times‘ health and medical coverage, is stepping up to become that newspaper’s science editor. On March 15, Strauch will take the place of Laura Chang, who led NYT science for six years. Chang will direct the paper’s “cross-departmental” coverage of the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
According to a report from Curtis Brainard and Cristine Russell on CJR.org, Strauch will lead a 22-person department (not including freelancers) and plans to maintain the paper’s equal emphasis on both health and science.
In addition to already prominent health topics like genetics, Strauch told CJR that she thinks issues like sociology, demography and psychology will rise in profile in the coming year. She also told the reporters that she plans to hire somebody to replace her as health editor, but that she’s going to remain flexible in terms of department structure for the time being.
In an internal e-mail announcing the promotion, NYT Executive Editor Bill Keller praised Strauch’s work on the paper’s health section.
“What was already a major undertaking, discerning and covering the most important stories in a constant stream of medical research, tracking the changing worlds of physicians and pharmaceuticals, has been a gargantuan task as the costs and politics of health care have become a consuming national issue,” he wrote. “Barbara’s deep understanding of the issues, her exquisite sense of timing and her appreciation for good storytelling have enriched every part of this coverage.”
Panel focuses on health reform anniversary
Filed under: Health care reform, Health journalism
Support for health reform has been complicated by political rhetoric and the general public’s lack of knowledge about the Affordable Care Act, according to officials who spoke at last week’s AHCJ Chicago chapter meeting.
Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, the director of coverage policy in the Office of Health Reform at the Department of Health and Humans Services, Michael McRaith, director of the Illinois Department of Insurance, and William Santulli, chief operating officer for Advocate Health Care, gathered to tell 25 journalists and students where the Act stands as its one-year anniversary approaches. Bruce Japsen, a Chicago Tribune health care reporter, moderated the panel.
The talked about the most common misnomers about the health care reform effort, how health insurance exchanges are being implemented, the concept behind accountable care organizations and more.
AHCJ members can read more about the discussion and download audio of the panel.
Members’ investigations prompt bills in Wash.
Filed under: Government, Health journalism, Health policy, Member news, Nursing, Pharmaceuticals
Three health-related bills moving through the Washington legislature came about as a result of articles reported by AHCJ members at The Seattle Times and InvestigateWest.
One bill is part of a “proposed overhaul of laws on long-term care of elderly adults” that was prompted by “Seniors for Sale,” a series by Seattle Times reporter and AHCJ member Mike Berens that detailed problems in the state’s adult family homes.
Another bill, unanimously approved by the state senate, will push a state agency to create standards on how to handle chemotherapy drugs. It was prompted by reporting from AHCJ member Carol Smith of InvestigateWest, a nonprofit journalism organization, that revealed that nurses who handle those drugs are exposed to health problems.
A related bill, intended to identify potential links between occupational exposures and cancer outcomes, also was unanimously approved by the senate. It would “require that a cancer patient’s occupation be reported to the registry, and that if the patient is retired, the patient’s primary occupation before retirement be reported,” InvestigateWest reports.
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Awards for Excellence in Health Care JournalismDeadline: Feb. 3
- How I did it: Falsified charts in nursing homes linked to patient care
- Access Denied: Looking at a lack of health care availability
- Transparency & medical errors: Public reporting of patient harm is a potent force
- Focus on freelancing: Tips for buying liability insurance
- Why do some patients get stuck in hospitals for weeks, months?
- Investigate health professionals and the boards that regulate them
- Presidents of AHCJ, SPJ call for more openness from Obama administration
