Tag Archives: Patient

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OB-GYN doctor quits medicine over $160,000 malpractice insurance premiums

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Story at the NY Post. (H/T Stop the ACLU via ECM)

Warner Todd Huston comments on the story:

Doctor Jacquelline Perlman has had it. After a 12-year career as an OB-GYN doctor she his quitting her practice.

[…]Last spring her insurer dropped her and several of her fellow doctors because of the high risk of covering OB-GYNs. Dr. Perlman’s new insurer was to charge $160,000 a year for coverage and that proved too much for Perlman to take.

Perlman noted that over the last five years, as her insurance costs multiplied, her actual income dropped by 20 percent.

So, another good doctor — one that has never had a malpractice case stick to her — leaves the profession. Now, before some of you out there assume the insurance companies is the villain here, let us pinpoint the real villain: trial lawyers.

It is the nuisance lawsuits, those filed merely to harass doctors in order to get a quick settlement, and lawyers that game the system with nonsense lawsuits as well as clients looking for a lottery-like payout that will make them instant millionaires that cause this problem.

Click here to read the rest. Remember, the Democrats are heavily supported by the trial lawyer lobby, and therefore tort reform was not included in the health care reform bill.

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Ethically-sound adult stem cell research cures paralysis in human patients

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There are two kinds of stem-cell research. The first kind is called embryonic stem-cell research (ESCR). This kind is opposed by pro-lifers because it kills unborn persons by extracting their stem cells for use in medical research. The second kind is called adult stem-cell research (ASCR). This kind is supported by pro-lifers.

You may be surprised to know that ESCR doesn’t work as nearly as well as ASCR. Despite all the advocacy from left-wing Hollywood actors, ESCR has not helped a single patient. But ASCR in being used for 73 different kinds of therapies, and it keeps getting better and better. Here’s the latest scientific discovery in ASCR.

Story from Wayne State University, which made the discovery. (H/T Secondhand Smoke via ECM)

Excerpt:

A new study by a Wayne State University School of Medicine researcher details the outcome of adult stem cell grafts in spinal cord injuries and how the procedure led to increased mobility and quality of life for patients.

Associate Professor Jean Peduzzi-Nelson of the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology conducted the study, “Olfactory Mucosal Autografts and Rehabilitation for Chronic Traumatic Spinal Cord Injury,” which was published online in the journal Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair.

The process involves the use of adult stem-like progenitor cells in the patient’s own nasal tissue. The use of a person’s own stem cells, Peduzzi-Nelson said, lessens the problems of rejection, tumor formation and disease transmission.

In the study, 20 patients with severe chronic spinal cord injuries received a treatment combination of partial scar removal, transplantation of nasal tissue containing stem cells to the site of the spinal cord injury and rehabilitation. All of the patients had total paralysis below the level of their spinal cord injury before the treatment.

More here.

Wesley J. Smith notes that ASCR is getting more and more efficient:

A team led by scientists from The Scripps Research Institute has developed a method that dramatically improves the efficiency of creating stem cells from human adult tissue, without the use of embryonic cells. The research makes great strides in addressing a major practical challenge in the development of stem-cell-based medicine…

The new technique, which uses three small drug-like chemicals, is 200 times more efficient and twice as fast as conventional methods for transforming adult human cells into stem cells (in this case called “induced pluripotent stem cells” or “iPS cells”). “Both in terms of speed and efficiency, we achieved major improvements over conventional conditions,” said Scripps Research Associate Professor Sheng Ding, Ph.D., who led the study. “This is the first example in human cells of how reprogramming speed can be accelerated. I believe that the field will quickly adopt this method, accelerating iPS cell research significantly.”

See below for other breakthroughs in ASCR, as well as the political implications.

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How Texas cut costs by reforming medical malpractice suits

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Here’s some great news from the conservative state of Texas. (H/T Caffeinated Thoughts)

Excerpt:

The Texas Legislature in 2003 adopted sweeping changes to its civil justice system that significantly altered when, where and how many lawsuits could be filed. In the medical malpractice area, those reforms were basically threefold.

[…]First, to sustain a lawsuit against the medical care provider, an expert report was required within 120 days of filing the suit stating that the doctor being sued committed a medical error that caused injuries.

[…]Second, noneconomic damages were capped to control arbitrary awards on pain and suffering or loss of consortium.

[…]The third significant tort reform was to prohibit the introduction into evidence of phantom damages.

[…]These common-sense reforms have led to a massive increase in the accessibility of health care in Texas, huge growth in the capital infrastructure of hospitals and clinics, hundreds of millions of dollars more each year in charity care and Texas’ adding more than 16,000 new doctors in just six years.

And in reducing the actual number of suits to those in which claims are meritorious — a recent Harvard study concluded that up to 85% of all lawsuits brought against medical providers were frivolous — we have created a more equitable system of justice.

I wish I lived in Texas – that’s a real red state, except for stupid Austin. By the way, I got this story out of the round-up at Caffeinated Thoughts. There are couple of great articles in there, like one on the North Korean gulags. It’s worth a look. Shane always links to very interesting articles.