Do We Really Need 100,000 Contact Tracers?
According to lexicographer and dictionary expert Susie Dent, the average active vocabulary of an adult English speaker is around 20,000 words. We also have a passive vocabulary of around 40,000 words, words we have stored but don’t use. The current environment is adding to our active vocabularies. It seems every day we hear the words […]
Why Did It Take a Pandemic to Be Able to Use Telehealth?
In early April I had a routine consultation with my electrophysiologist at Nuvance Health via telehealth. Nuvance uses telehealth technology from American Well. In preparation for the consult, I took my blood pressure with a Qardio cuff and my iPhone, weighed myself on the Fitbit scale, and took a 30-second ECG with the Apple Watch. […]
AI Detects Heart Failure From One Beat
Heart failure has been in the news a lot lately. It used to be the disease of older people, but younger ones (40-50) are gaining. The negative trend for younger people is mostly related to lifestyle. For us older (and wiser?) people, nearly 10 percent of those over 65 are afflicted with some form of […]
When Have We Seen Enough Drug Ads on TV?
I believe Alex Azar, Secretary of Health and Human Services, is doing a good job of trying to improve our broken healthcare system. The move to allow states to seek a Federal waiver to implement Medicaid in ways tailored to their needs has a lot of potential. Some states have already shown they can reduce […]
Medicare to Negotiate with Pharmaceutical Industry
In March 2015, Health Attitude: Unraveling and Solving the Complexities of Healthcare was published. One of the recommendations made in the book, to address the spiraling healthcare cost for Americans, was to allow Medicare to negotiate the price of drugs. It was a lone voice at the time, but since then more and more people, including the […]
