Thinking Harder
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Doctor Self-Referral: Should You Get That X-Ray or CT Scan?
Continue reading… 27 CommentsA front-page story in today's Washington Post might give you pause the next time a doctor offers to scan you to determine the source of a health complaint. The story, by Shankar Vedantam, gets to the heart of a financial conflict of interest that's rife in many outpatient medical practices. It's called physician self-referral. That jargony term is just a label for what occurs when a doctor tells you that you need a test or procedure and then offers to sell you—er, perform for you—that same test or procedure.
It happens all the time, and there's nothing intrinsically nefarious about it. In fact, self-referral is often an enormous boon and time-saver for patients. As Vedantam suggests, if you go to a doctor because you've hurt your foot, you'd probably be quite glad to find that she has an X-ray machine in her office and can determine on the spot if you've broken a bone. A doctor without a scanner, and therefore unable to self-refer, would have to prescribe a foot X-ray and send you elsewhere to get it. What would that mean for you? Another appointment, another copayment, and possibly a delayed diagnosis. Chalk one up for self-referral.
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Why a Man Let 2,000 Malaria-Infected Mosquitoes Bite Him
Continue reading… 8 CommentsSome people will go to extreme lengths to avoid mosquito bites. They'll wear long sleeves and pants in the heat of summer, surround themselves with citronella candles and torches, and spray foul-smelling chemicals all over their bodies—or simply not set foot outside when they know the bugs are biting.
Stephen Hoffman isn't quite like those people. In fact, he has gone out of his way to get bitten. Years ago, he let 2,000 mosquitoes feast on his arm and inject perhaps 200,000 parasites into his bloodstream. Why? Well, for one thing, it made him immune to malaria.
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Volunteering for a Clinical Trial: Have You? Would You?
Continue reading… 6 CommentsI once came very close to receiving an experimental vaccine that, let's face it, could conceivably have killed me. In retrospect, I'm glad the researchers running the trial decided that I wasn't eligible to be a study subject. But at the time I was actually disappointed when they turned me down.
I'm planning to write a feature about people who volunteer for clinical trials, why they do it, and what they get out of it. In my case, I was just doing my job; I was a reporter chasing a good story.
