With a total of 48 posts (this will be the 49th), this has been my most prolific year of blogging since 2017. Nearly a third of these were on or related to the COVID-19 pandemic and its public health consequences, but I wrote about many other topics, too. With a nod to the ongoing 12 days of Christmas, I've picked 12 posts to highlight here, one from each month.
January 15 - When a cancer diagnosis predicts future good health
For early prostate, breast (including ductal carcinoma in situ, which was considered separately), thyroid cancer, and melanoma, relative survival was not only better than disease-specific survival, but greater than 100%. In other words, patients with these particular early cancer types were more likely to survive than similar individuals without cancer.
A year's membership in a DPC practice can generally be had for about one month of Presidential candidate Andrew Yang's Freedom Dividend, making it accessible not only to the middle and upper classes, but to patients who are can't afford traditional primary care. Medical schools should prioritize exposing more students to this new primary care model for us to have any hope of attracting one-quarter of them into family medicine.
While women age 70 to 74 years who continued to have screening mammograms had a 22 percent lower risk [of death from breast cancer] than those who stopped being screened, there was no mortality benefit for women who continued screening after age 75 years.
Social distancing, widespread testing, contact tracing, and vaccine development won't be enough to halt the pandemic if we leave millions of Americans behind; it's no wonder that Medicaid expansion has been proposed as a potent policy tool for mitigating the health and economic impact of COVID-19.
Whether it's the President of the United States repeatedly lying about the impact of COVID-19; the closing of essential hospitals in underserved minority or rural communities; or a modern-day epidemic of amputations in black Americans in Southern former slave states; these protests are an expression of deep-seated rage about an epidemic of inequality that men and women in power have long minimized, dismissed or ignored.
Just as COVID-19 has accelerated an overdue transition to providing more health care virtually, I hope that it will also inspire researchers to "study what was gained" from postponed or cancelled appointments with family doctors and surgeons. If the pandemic has a silver lining, this might be it.
For their "Best Hospitals for America" rankings, Lown created a Hospital Index that incorporated not only patient outcomes (mortality, safety, and satisfaction), but also civic leadership (community benefit, representativeness of patients compared to the surrounding community, and institutional salary distribution) and medical overuse.
Just as emergency medicine physicians are often justified at taking a more aggressive testing and treatment approach to a patient with chest pain than a family physician evaluating a patient in his or her office, it's arguable that the greater long-term risk of cardiovascular events in patients who see cardiologists warrant more intensive treatment of blood pressure than patients in primary care settings.
Although age and race inequalities largely explain America's uneven experience of COVID-19 to date, that is no assurance that it will stay that way. HIV/AIDS was a viral disease that only affected urban gay men and intravenous drug users - until it wasn't.
Family physicians' expertise in cancer mostly involves screening and diagnosis, while treatment is managed by medical and/or surgical oncologists. However, as the long-term survival of patients with cancer improves, the important care role of primary care clinicians in survivors of childhood and adult cancers has been increasingly recognized.
I don't believe that prisons should be abolished, any more than I believe that police departments should be defunded. But if the U.S. is going to continue to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into incarceration every year, a large chunk of those dollars ought to be devoted to peacemaking - making the offender whole and less likely to offend again - rather than punishment.
State-mandated screening at birth for rare, serious medical conditions occurs in 4 to 5 million newborns and detects 5,000 to 6,000 affected infants each year. With a combined incidence of 1 out of every 1,500 births, inborn errors of metabolism are the most common conditions detected by newborn screening.