Sunday, June 01, 2014

Obama Success, or Global Shame?

"Since violent clashes in 2012, the Rohingya have been confined to quasi-concentration camps or to their villages, denied ready access to markets, jobs or hospitals. This spring, the authorities expelled the aid group Doctors Without Borders, which had been providing the Rohingya with medical care. Orchestrated violent attacks on the offices of humanitarian organizations drove many aid workers away as well and seemed intended in part to remove foreign witnesses to this ethnic cleansing."

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

A CONTROVERSIAL OASIS OF HEALTH CARE
"The center is largely funded by private donations, with additional support from the Sudanese government, which has committed two and a half million dollars a year. The organization estimates that, with its current infrastructure, a single valve replacement costs two thousand dollars, half of that being the cost of the valve itself; in the United States, the surgery could cost upward of thirty thousand dollars. Still, Sudan’s total per-capita expenditure on health in 2011 was less than two hundred dollars. On a continent where nearly fifty per cent of deaths in children under five are attributable to malnutrition and thirty per cent are preventable with vaccines, the argument for directing efforts toward improved primary care, rather than expensive specialized surgery, is compelling. One of the facility’s critics is Fred Cobey, an anesthesiologist at Tufts Medical Center, who worked at the Salam Centre for three months in 2010. 'Millions and millions of dollars have been poured into this place,' he told me. 'Even after working there, I still feel the money could be better spent elsewhere, like on basic health services. You saw how poor the surrounding area is; people have nothing.' The official position of the World Heart Federation is that surgery for rheumatic heart disease is 'a drain on the limited health resources of poor countries.'"

Monday, January 20, 2014

What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?
 
"Today, more than one in five American children live in poverty. How, if at all, to intervene is almost invariably a politically fraught question. Scientists interested in the link between poverty and mental health, however, often face a more fundamental problem: a relative dearth of experiments that test and compare potential interventions."

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Medical scribes

This would make clinic more efficient.

Thursday, December 05, 2013

Friday, November 29, 2013