Psychiatry

"The current health care reform proposal is just a beginning," says Norman Makous, MD. "This legislation addresses health coverage reform. The problem that has not been touched in the current legislation relates to how we provide medical services.

This 10-part series will expose why consumers and doctors are getting the short shrift in all healthcare reform proposals.

MDNG editorial board member Larry Chu, MD will cover the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show live via this page on HCPLive.com. Sign up below for a reminder to come back after 11:00AM (EST) on January 7.

It looks like 2010 is starting off with some changes in healthcare on the horizon – from a number of angles.

Several recent studies have demonstrated that text messaging can produce measurable clinical benefits such as improved glucose test rates and a decrease in acute liver rejection episodes.

Newly published study results show that use of the herbal supplement for several years in patients age 72-96 did not result in a slower rate of cognitive decline than placebo.

I became a blogger 4 months ago, a gig that I find fascinating and refreshing. A place for me to vent, pontificate, and generally hold forth with a jaundiced view of my profession and the industrial Goliaths that support it.

New findings from a team of Canadian researchers show that young brains are affected more by cannabis than originally thought.

In a University of Kentucky study, acetaminophen reduced neural responses to social rejection in brain regions associated with the distress of social pain and the affective component of physical pain (the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula)

We spoke with Dr. Kent Willyard about his experience using Epocrates since it was introduced to healthcare professionals.

One in 110 American 8-year-olds is classified as having an autism spectrum disorder, a 57 percent increase in ASD cases compared to four years earlier. Boys 4.5 times more likely than girls to have ASD.

Sen. Joe Lieberman is officially working to block health care reform in the Congress; he especially desires de-postponing any kind of "health care reform" until the economy has recovered.

The International Psychopharmacology Algorithm Project (IPAP) offers several Web-based algorithms for the systematic treatment of major Axis I psychiatric disorders.

A recent study from the National Institutes of Mental Health shows that a little more than half of children and adolescents in the US diagnosed with a mental disorder have seen a mental health professional.

I watched a student reading her text from a hand-held device not too long ago in class, and wondered how she could read print that it fit such a small screen. Soon I'll find out for myself I've just been informed by a family member that a Nook is coming my way after the holidays.

This podcast interview with Dr. Carol Campbell, focuses on Campbell's study which explores how patients suffering from chronic pain who discuss their pain often and freely can frustrate and alienate family and friends.

This activity covers a German report in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders that found of 448 patients reporting at least one episode of neck pain between March 2005 and April 2006, "depression and anxiety were highly significantly correlated with increasing levels of neck pain."

The development of clinical medical-practice guidelines is a difficult and arduous process. Experts in various disciplines volunteer many hours of their time for medical research reviews and analyses and meetings with fellow guidelines-panel members, and painstakingly writing and reviewing the final report. However, there are many concerns about the quality of medical research serving as a basis for those guidelines.

I overhead two women chatting about symptoms the other day while they were surfing WebMD on their respective iPhones for diagnoses - their discussion was as public and non-chalant as if they were shopping. I mused over this for a minute, unsure if I should be disturbed or not, and then found myself wondering which URLs really are the "go-to" sites for health information. An answer was only a click away via Google search at eBizMBA.com.

Way back in January, Phil Baumann, RN, provided an empathic answer to the question/concern that was on everyone's mind then: "Yeah Twitter seems great and all, but can you use it for anything useful in healthcare?" We followed up with him to see how 2009 went.

A team of psychiatrists at Stanford University School of Medicine has discovered that "scrambled connections" in the amygdala may be the "hallmark" of generalized anxiety disorder, or GAD.

HITECH says covered entities must be able to monitor and record every time that patient data is accessed, enabling the entity to comply with the new notification requirements should unauthorized access occur. Will the new rules end up restricting the efficient exchange of data that is crucial to providing high-quality healthcare?

As EHRs are widely adopted and the quantity of information about a patient expands dramatically, does provider liability increase even if the quality of care is vastly improved?

Large organizations with mobile workers, such as hospitals, face diminished productivity when communication is inefficient and its employees are unable to locate their coworkers in a timely manner.

Bravo. The government finally has its healthcare IT priorities straight. Unfortunately, it won't be able to achieve them.

For those interested in health information technology, there is now an excellent, new, powerful website about this topic called the Huffington Post Investigative Fund. In their most recent report, "Can Cleveland Clinic Be a Model for Digital Medicine?" they discuss how this hospital system has failed to recoup their $100 million investment to date.

Some pundits have written that health insurance mandates are well beyond the constitutional authority of the federal government to tax, spend, and regulate interstate commerce. Others have picked up on these arguments and applied them to the EHR-implementation incentives under the HITECH Act as well. The bottom line is that these arguments fail, for four reasons.

There has been much discussion about the HITECH Act and the effects it will have on healthcare in this country. The health IT industry and the federal government claim that EHR use will lead to a decrease in costs and an overall improvement in patient care. Skeptics like me disagree with these claims and feel that the push to adopt complex EHRs will be a bad deal for physicians.

Lately, I've been thinking about how fast everything moves these days. This is true in technology, medicine, business, and other important areas of our lives. Keeping up with changes in healthcare is a real challenge; just reading monthly print medical journals won't cut it anymore in the digital age. Now, practically every day I find myself looking something up on Wikipedia.

Women who have been diagnosed recently with cancer or multiple sclerosis are six times more likely to be separated or divorced than their recently diagnosed male counterparts, according to a study in Cancer.