Free Republic

Healey, along with members of the Massachusetts Medical Society, Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association and the Massachusetts Major City Chiefs of Police, announced their gun resources for patients this week. (Photo: Mass.gov) State Attorney General Martha Healey teamed up with the Massachusetts Medical Society on Monday to provide voluntary guidance to heath care professionals in the state on guns. Announced at Boston Medical Center, Healey and Mass Med are providing two pamphlets and free training on talking to patients about firearms. “While the vast majority of gun owners are responsible and deeply committed to gun safety, this remains a public...

Doctors have been told to refer to expectant mothers as “pregnant people” so as not to offend transgender people, in official guidelines issued by the British Medical Association (BMA). The controversial advice appears in a 14-page booklet on “inclusive language in the workplace” which also rules that the terms ‘biologically male’ and ‘biologically female’ are problematic, and instructs doctors to instead say that the individual was ‘assigned’ male or female at birth. The union’s new guidelines come just weeks after it emerged that a British woman in the process of ‘transitioning’ gender put her operation on hold to have a...

When she grows up, Lynlee Boemer should demand to celebrate two birthdays a year. For she is the baby who was born twice. Her proper entry into the world came 12 weeks after she was temporarily taken out of her mother’s womb for a life-saving operation. Doctors discovered a tumour in the tailbone of Margaret Boemer’s unborn baby when the mother-to-be went for a routine ultrasound just 16 weeks into her pregnancy. Her only hope was a medical procedure that required surgeons to open up the womb and take the 1 lb, 3 oz foetus out for 20 minutes for...

A survey done at Yale, based on doctors political party registration, found that there was a significant difference in how Republican and Democrat doctors treated patients who owned guns. From wisconsingazette.com: And Democratic doctors were 66 percent more likely to say they’d urge parents of small children not to store guns in the home — while Republican doctors instead preferred to ask about safe storage of the firearms, concluded the survey, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “This was really an eye-opener,” said bioethicist Nancy Berlinger of The Hastings Center, a nonpartisan research institute. She wasn’t...

After his 34-year-old wife suffered a devastating asthma attack and later died, the Boston writer Peter DeMarco wrote the following letter to the intensive care unit staff of CHA Cambridge Hospital who cared for her and helped him cope.As I begin to tell my friends and family about the seven days you treated my wife, Laura Levis, in what turned out to be the last days of her young life, they stop me at about the 15th name that I recall. The list includes the doctors, nurses, respiratory specialists, social workers, even cleaning staff members who cared for her.

It is convenient for Barack Obama to continue running the show with a fragile Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office The 71% of 250 physicians responding to an informal internet survey by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) saying Hillary Clinton’s health challenges are “serious” enough to disqualify her for the position of President of the U.S., are in the same category as all those still holding out hope that she will be indicted for her email scandal. As the savvy would know, you can be anything you want on the Internet. Could the good doctors polled be...

Violence, racism, intolerance and religious bigotry made headlines this summer and the American Academy of Pediatrics took notice. These issues are impacting children and the organization wants to address the societal problems proactively with kids and their families.“We need to talk more about this, definitely,” said Dr. Sylvia Blaustein of St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center in Paterson. “I think everybody should be discussing these issues because of what’s going on nationally and internationally.”  The AAP was pushed to action in early July after shootings in Baton Rouge and Dallas. It announced an initiative aimed at addressing gun violence as...

This rate of acceleration will, as I have repeatedly pointed out, bankrupt the Federal Government within the next administration's term. It will in fact exceed all current federal spending within the next 10 years. Neither of these events will actually come to pass because you cannot have a government when you can't pay the light bill in Washington DC. There is exactly one way to stop this from happening and that is to start prosecuting and imprisoning, right now, each and every instance of price-fixing (Sherman/Clayton), attempts to monopolize markets (Sherman/Clayton again), pricing discrimination of like kind and quantity for...

Two-thirds of Americans are okay with doctors discussing guns, according to a new survey published by The Annals of Internal Medicine. The online survey asked Americans whether it’s appropriate for healthcare professionals to talk to their patients about guns. Sixty-six percent of the over 3,900 respondents indicated that it’s at least sometimes appropriate for docs to talk guns. In contrast, 34 percent indicated the topic of guns should never be broached with patients. As part of the survey, participants were asked to indicate whether they were gun owners. Of those that admitted to having guns in the home, half stated...

Islamic supremacy is arriving in medical settings using stealth means, or what is often referred to as creeping sharia. Common themes include Muslim health care workers refusing to uphold infection control protocols, Muslim medical students refusing to study topics they deem forbidden according to Islamic law, Muslim visitors in hospitals ignoring hygiene guidelines to protect patients, and hospitals bending over backwards (or is it forwards?) to accommodate Muslim demands above and beyond anything done for members of any other religious or demographic group. Also covered are outright acts of violence perpetrated by Muslim men who attack hospital personnel. Islamic supremacy...

White male physicians in the United States earn a whopping 35 percent more than their black male counterparts — even after accounting for factors such as field of medical specialty, experience, and hours worked. Data published Tuesday in the British Medical Journal also showed a large gender gap. White female physicians earned 40 percent less than white men, and black women earned less still.

Doctors routinely ask if you smoke, and counsel you to wear your seat belt when you’re in a car. Technically, either behavior isn’t any of their business, but they do fall under the umbrella of preventive care. Now Dr. Garen Wintemute, director of the violence prevention research program at the University of California Davis, and his colleagues want to add firearms to the office visit for similar reasons. First, he says that no federal or state laws prevent doctors from asking their patients about whether they have guns in the home.

The U.S. will face a shortage of 46,000 to 90,000 physicians by 2025, according to a report issued by the Association of American Medical Colleges. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services notes that the population of Americans age 65 and older will double between 2013 and 2040, swelling to 98 million. Older patients face complex health issues that require more frequent and intensive forms of treatment. These trends suggest that if nothing is done to lower the high barriers to people seeking medical careers, it will only be a few years until patients will not be able...

Michigan faces a widespread shortage of primary health care providers, and state rules on midlevel health care providers have held up a valuable solution to this problem. Nurse practitioners and physician assistants offer competent care in more locations and at a lower cost than physicians, but these professionals are limited by protectionist restrictions known as “scope of practice” rules. Policymakers should loosen these restrictions to make health care services easier to obtain and afford. Scope of practice restrictions are defended as an attempt to raise standards of care by limiting the range of procedures a medical professional is licensed to...

Primary-care shortage is growing especially acute in rural areas and in parts of some cities. The doctor is disappearing in America. And by most projections, it’s only going to get worse — the U.S. could lose as many as 1 million doctors by 2025, according to a Association of American Medical Colleges report. Primary-care physicians will account for as much as one-third of that shortage, meaning the doctor you likely interact with most often is also becoming much more difficult to see. Tasked with checkups and referring more complicated health problems to specialists, these doctors have the most consistent contact...

The doctor is disappearing in America. And by most projections, it’s only going to get worse — the U.S. could lose as many as 1 million doctors by 2025, according to a Association of American Medical Colleges report. Primary-care physicians will account for as much as one-third of that shortage, meaning the doctor you likely interact with most often is also becoming much more difficult to see.

A “large number” of doctors in certain EU member states still view homosexuality as a disease, a report has revealed. Euroefe reports. “The research also shows that there are still quite a number of healthcare professionals in several EU member states who believe LGBT people suffer from pathological diseases,” said Michael O’Flaherty, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA). A recent FRA report found that Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Poland and Slovakia are the EU countries where this misconception is most widely held. This negative view of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people held by groups of professionals...

The Eleventh Circuit court of appeals, in an unusual decision, has decided to hear the case of Dr. Bernd Wollschlaeger, et al. v. Governor State of FL, et al.  in the matter of the Firearm Owners Privacy Act (FOPA).  The FOPA provided that doctors and other health care professionals could not use their professional position of power in order to collect private information from firearms owners, and potentially make that information available to third parties and numerous government agencies.  FOPA had been struck down by the district court, then upheld in three different rulings by the three judge panel...

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Sen. Barack Obama began peddling his national healthcare system. On more than one occasion, he pointed to Canada and the United Kingdom as examples of a workable national healthcare system. When I first heard him point to them, I instantly thought of Rachel, a work acquaintance who lived and worked in the United Kingdom. She was experiencing abdominal pains and having problems eating for months before England’s National Health Service doctors finally diagnosed the problem to be her gall bladder. The doctor said it needed to be removed. However, from the time they wrote the...

Two months ago, we posted a story describing how three healthcare-related non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are conspiring to undo hard-fought improvements in work rules, pertaining to surgical resident physicians. The NGOs in question are the American Board of Surgery, the American College of Surgeons, and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). Leading the pack in this endeavor is ACGME, which just five years earlier did cut the number of allowable hours that these residents could put in. As it happens, the cut in hours was forced on the industry, based on outrageous violations in which the stated hours were...