Medical News & Information

 A 10-year, $20 billion tax on medical device makers would begin in 2013 under President Barack Obama’s new healthcare reform proposal.

It’s déja vu all over again for medical device manufacturers that may have thought the election of Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts would kill the dreaded $20 billion medical device tax.

That’s because President Barack Obama’s legislative proposal for overhauling the healthcare system, released by the White House today, includes the very same 10-year, $20 billion tax on the medical device industry that was included in earlier healthcare reform bills.

The excise tax, which would be administered by the Internal Revenue Service, will not be implemented until 2013, according to the 11-page proposal. The rollout deadline marks a change from the Senate’s healthcare reform bill, which passed on Dec. 24, 2009. That bill had the approximately $2 billion-per-year tax on the industry beginning in 2011. (In December, an amendment sponsored by Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) to push the date back to 2013 wasn’t adopted in the final Senate bill.)

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Researchers hope to harness mind’s reaction to medication

WEDNESDAY, Dec. 30 (HealthDay News) — Researchers have long wondered why placebos — fake medications — sometimes help sick patients get better.

Now, a new study says placebos can help psoriasis patients get by on smaller doses of a steroid drug that dampens their immune systems.

The study authors, from the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York, think they may be able to develop other treatments that rely on the placebo effect to boost the power of lower doses of existing drugs.

“Our study provides evidence that the placebo effect can make possible the treatment of psoriasis with an amount of drug that should be too small to work,” lead investigator Dr. Robert Ader, a professor at the University of Rochester School of Medicine & Dentistry, said in a news release from the school. “While these results are preliminary, we believe the medical establishment needs to recognize the mind’s reaction to medication as a powerful part of many drug effects, and start taking advantage of it.”

There are limitations, however. Placebos can’t help people who are unconscious or stimulate the release of substances in the body, such as insulin, Ader said.

The researchers tested creams on 46 patients with mild and moderate cases of psoriasis. One group got fully medicated creams, while others got mixtures that were partially medicated or received full doses only part of the time.

In some cases, the patients seemed to do well despite not getting the full dose, suggesting a psychosomatic effect.

The study was published online Dec. 22 in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine.

More information

For more on the placebo effect, see the American Cancer Society.

– Randy Dotinga

SOURCE: University of Rochester Medical Center, news release, Dec. 22, 2009

ScienceDaily (Jan. 5, 2010) — Children whose parents refuse the varicella (chickenpox) vaccine appear more likely to develop the disease, according to a report in the January issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Routine childhood immunizations have reduced illness and death related to a wide variety of vaccine-preventable diseases, according to background information in the article. Recent trends, however, suggest that public trust in the national immunization program is declining.

“Expanding childhood immunization requirements and increased media coverage of alleged associations between vaccinations and chronic illnesses have heightened parental concerns regarding vaccine safety,” the authors write. “Parents have also expressed concerns that children are at low risk of infection and that many vaccine-preventable diseases are not serious. During the last decade, as a consequence, the number of parents who claimed non-medical exemptions to school immunization requirements has increased significantly.”

Jason M. Glanz, Ph.D., of Kaiser Permanente’s Institute for Health Research, Denver, and colleagues studied 133 children enrolled in one health plan who developed chickenpox between 1998 and 2008. Each case was matched to four randomly selected children who were the same age and sex and had been enrolled in the plan for the same amount of time, but had not developed chickenpox.

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New York, January 6 – Most of us have a habit of grabbing the kitchen spoons while taking liquid medicines. However, a new study warns that wrong spoon size may cause dosing errors as people tend to pour either too little or too much of the medicine.

“Clearly we know that there are a lot of people — despite all the alternatives they are offered — who open the kitchen drawer and grab a spoon to serve up their liquid medicine,” observed study co-author Koert van Ittersum, an assistant professor of marketing in the College of Management at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

“But previous work has already shown that the size of your mug or glass influences how much one pours,” he noted. “Just as the size of a plate influences how much one eats. So, here we have found that utensils also have an effect on dosing because our mind plays tricks on us. And so spoon size matters.”

195 students studied
To find out whether spoon size may cause medicine dosage errors, Ittersum and colleagues focused on 195 students who had visited the university clinic during the cold and flu season.

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