Oct 27, 2024

Still, other data suggests the practice continues to occur in various institutions across the country. In a 2018 study published in the journal of Anatomical Sciences Education, 12% of 146 medical schools who responded to a survey said they used unclaimed bodies in medical education, with many of the people who ran the programs reporting that they were neutral on the question of whether it was important to tell students about the origins of the body, said study author Dr. Matthew DeCamp, a general internist at John Hopkins University.

Oct 22, 2024

Lisa Bero, a professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, has been at the forefront of understanding how corporate funding biases research and how to assess what scientific evidence is reliable. She talks to host Monya Baker about her investigations into the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries, techniques industries use to shape evidence to favor their products, and the importance of independent research to inform policy.

Oct 22, 2024

Prof. Goldberg’s book examines how the NFL has for decades masterfully, successfully employed a set of strategies or scripts termed the “Manufacture of Doubt,” to avoid governmental regulation.

Oct 22, 2024

Early this year, evidence began to emerge of alleged abuses of Gazans held at Israel’s Sde Teiman military detention facility, which was established after the Hamas terrorist attacks of Oct. 7, 2023. Documented in reports by Israeli human rights groups (e.g., here and here), United Nations agencies, and investigative journalists (e.g., here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), they have included dozens of accounts of detainees subjected to severe and repeated beatings, rape (which was captured on video and broadcast in August on an Israeli television station), constant shackling, continuous blindfolding, suspension from a chain, and other forms of torture, as well as inhumane and degrading treatment including keeping detainees in diapers in unsanitary conditions and denying them appropriate food.

Oct 17, 2024

In October 2021, TJ Hoover was declared dead and on the brink of having his organs removed to be transplanted into other people. The surgery was halted in the operating room.

Oct 14, 2024

Messages from patients to care teams via patient portals are increasing and may be associated with burnout. Health systems are deploying large language models (LLMs) to address this issue by drafting replies to patient messages.

Oct 4, 2024

Hundreds attend Community Response to Child Abuse Conference

Sep 23, 2024

NEWSWEEK: Senate Republicans and Democrats came together almost unanimously to advance the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which requires internet companies to keep children's safety in mind when designing the online platforms they use—something required of every other industry.

In an OP/ED co-authored by Professor Warren Binford, Big Tech is doing everything it can to kill the bill in the House of Representatives. Why? Money. In the words of congressional witness, former Facebook executive Frances Haugen, "The company's leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but won't make the necessary changes because they put their astronomical profits before people."

Sep 10, 2024

MEDPAGE TODAY: In July, the FDA issued an advisory on a global shortage of Becton Dickenson's (BD) proprietary Bactec blood culture bottles -- which are essential in the case of suspected bloodstream infections. BD does not expect the supply-chain crisis to be resolved until early next year. This shortage and Its disparate impact offers lessons in resource sharing and medical ethics. Without blood cultures, serious infections can be missed and patients may be over-exposed to overly broad antibiotics, raising the risk of antibiotic resistance and side effects.

Authors Anuj Mehta, MD, MS, and Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH, are the co-chairs of the Medical Advisory Panel of the Mountain Plains Regional Disaster Health Response System, which recently issued guidelines on how to minimize the harms arising from this shortage.

Jul 31, 2024

JAMA VIEWPOINT: Historically, an essential and ubiquitous component of physicians’ oaths and their related ethical codes is the promise to place patients’ interests above any others, including their own. In this perspective, Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH, and Patricia Gabow, MD, address the rising challenges that health providers face in fulfilling this core professional promise not from a virus but from 3 converging fronts: personal conscience, employment contracts, and laws. The authors suggest that health providers need to work to recenter medical care around patients’ interests, which can be difficult or even dangerous, but it is the only path forward if physicians hope to remain a true profession.

Jul 19, 2024

JAMA HEALTH FORUM: Lauren Hersch Nicholas, PhD, MPP, is corresponding author of an investigation that analyzed the experiences of more than a million people receiving Medicare-funded services in the last six months of their lives. Co-authors from our campus are Stacy M. Fischer, MD, Marcelo Coca Perraillon, PhD, and Christine D. Jones, MD.

Nicholas and colleagues found that the kind of Medicare a patient is enrolled in can make a difference in whether that patient gets certain treatments, and whether the patient dies in a hospital or in hospice care. “For patients near the end-of-life, Medicare Advantage incentives may reduce potentially burdensome care and encourage hospice,” Nicholas’ paper says, “but could also restrict access to costly but necessary services.”

Jul 27, 2024

FORBES: When a patient comes to the hospital with a serious infection or fever, one of the first things done is to draw two sets of blood cultures to try to identify the source of the infection and the antibiotics that will most specifically target the bacterial (or fungal) culprit. This blood culture bottle shortage will result in difficult triage and rationing decisions, and both physicians and patients will be hurt, although in different ways.

Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH, notes, “there have been dozens of reports written about how to address drug shortages, all of which include the recommendation that we really ought not have sole source for anything. You need diversification of your supply chain.” Wynia says, “We may never fully recover psychologically from the pandemic and the moral distress associated with having patients who needed something, and we couldn't give it to them because we didn't have it.” He sees the same thing happening now with this critical shortage of blood culture bottles. He also questioned what, if anything, patients will be told.

Jul 8, 2024

NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO: In a Tennessee operating room, Dr. Marty Sellers is performing a revolutionary organ recovery technique, normothermic regional perfusion. "It replenishes the oxygen deprivation that the organs incur during the dying process," says Sellers. "If we recover the organ and put it on ice in an oxygen-deprived state, it’s not as healthy when it gets into the recipient."

The American Journal of Bioethics dedicated a recent issue to the controversy over whether the technique blurs the definition of death. "The bottom line is that NRP violates foundational ethical norms around the determination of death and should not be pursued," says Matthew DeCamp, MD, PhD, who helped write a policy statement opposing NRP for the American College of Physicians.

Jul 2, 2024

JAMA OPEN FORUM: Christine Baugh, PhD, MPH, Eric G. Campbell, PhD, Lisa Bero, PhD, and co-authors published a study of pharmaceutical and medical device industry events for health professionals, utilizing data from the Medicare/Medicaid Open Payments database. Their findings suggest that expanding and enforcing the reporting requirements to cover all payments to all registered health professionals would improve the transparency and accuracy of estimates of the true extent of all sponsored events, as well as their reach and impact on clinical practice.

Jun 18, 2024

ANNALS OF INTERNAL MEDICINE: Mark J. Kissler, MD, and five CU Anschutz colleagues are the authors of a paper that evaluates medical literature on the role of attention in the clinical environment. They identified 6 categories of literature related to attention: the clinical environment and its effect on attention, personal factors affecting attention, relationships between interventions or factors that affect attention and patient outcomes, the effect of clinical alarms and alarm fatigue on attention, and health information technology’s effect on attention.

The authors propose that a well-functioning environment enables good care without overtaxing the clinician’s cognitive or emotional resources. But simply creating a “sterile cockpit” for a distraction-free environment is unrealistic in most health care settings. They conclude that to be effective, health care quality improvement efforts need to transition from siloed quality improvement interventions to multidisciplinary efforts that understand that health care is composed of complex and overlapping environments.

Jul 1, 2024

Abraham M. Nussbaum, MD, professor of psychiatry and chief education officer at Denver Health, is author of Progress Notes: One Year in the Future of Medicine, a book that follows seven CU medical students through their training, particularly through the longitudinal integrated clerkship (LIC) structure that forms the basis for our new curriculum.

Abraham also offers a clear explanation of how we aim to teach our students to become better physicians: The new curriculum begins with a year of basic sciences but will be organized around clinical complaints. Hence, instead of learning the anatomy of the heart as its own topic, students will learn it in the context of a patient presenting with chest pain. They will learn about the anatomy of the heart in relationship to the physical examination, to available medications and procedures, and to social determinants of health. This book tells the compelling story of how to become a physician, serve our patients and our community, and pursue a fulfilling life. Published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Jun 12, 2024

JOURNAL OF ELDER ABUSE AND NEGLECT: Kristin Furfari, MD, Jackie Glover, PhD, and co-authors describe the roles and best practices for ethics consultation services and elder mistreatment (EM) response team collaboration; present four in-depth patient scenarios and the ethical frameworks that arise in cases of EM, and describe the collaborative processes that foster the best solutions for these patients.

Jun 4, 2024

ANNALS OF INTERNAL MEDICINE: Artificial Intelligence is expanding throughout the provision of health care, in applications such as clinical documentation, diagnostic image processing, and clinical decision support. Matthew DeCamp, MD, PhD, and co-authors developed 10 recommendations/position statements to ensure the greatest benefit and minimum harm to patients from these new technologies, and to ensure that they are used in alignment with the ethical responsibilities of physicians and the medical profession.

The authors recognize the dynamic and evolving nature of AI technology and advocate for more guidance, regulatory oversight, research, and education for physicians, other clinicians, and health care systems to maximize clinical safety and effectiveness of these tools as well as understanding their potential consequences regarding health disparities.

May 31, 2024

NEW YORK TIMES: People who are starting to experience cognitive decline may miss payments, make impulsive purchases or put money into risky investments. Lauren Hersch Nicholas, PhD, MPP, who studies dementia's impacts on people's finances advises, "We should be thinking about the possibility of financial difficulties linked to a disease we don’t even know we have. Knowing that, people should be on the lookout for these symptoms among friends and family members.”

May 30, 2024

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE AND ALLIED SCIENCES: Law is a powerful social determinant of health. Public health laws, in and out of pandemics, are historically patterned. Daniel Goldberg, JD, PhD, says historical fluency is required for effective work in crafting legal and policy interventions as a part of public health emergency preparedness and response.

The questions of how public health workers and policymakers may acquire such competency and creating space for historical training in crowded public health curricula is its own considerable challenge.