The Cochrane Collaboration, an international body which evaluates published medical trials, has interesting insights into the nature of the results of compilations of study data in trials done all over the world. A brand new Cochrane review upholds the clinical suspicions which physicians and healthcare lobbyists know only too well: that studies with positive results are more likely to see the light of publication, reach publication sooner, saturate the media easier, and influence healthcare policy more effortlessly.

So-called negative studies (those which conclude results which may refute established medical dogma or anecdotal belief) were seriously hampered by what the researchers/evaluators termed as “publication bias”. Many involved in shaping healthcare delivery policy in this country know how important a trial with a positive result is as it applies to high powered Washington lobbying; this issue will become much more important as the Obama administration has pledged “transparency” (a word it uses front and center on its official White House blog, describing it as one of its innate characteristics) with respect to all policy matters.

Just as many have cried out that healthcare policy was over politicized and favored Pharma and Big Insurance in the Bush administration, time will tell if Barack Obama is pressured by those same critics to renounce policies which have their genesis in findings like those provided by Cochrane. | LINK

Although his quest to “fix the healthcare system” currently has as much of a pie-in-the-sky altruism and idealism about it as — say, ending the Iraq War — there is much the future President Barack Obama can do on the issue of healthcare delivery immediately upon swearing in office in January. At the top of the list is revisiting the current President George W. Bush-led legislation involving the so-called “conscience rule”, which gives healthcare providers an out when faced with the possibility of performing procedures or prescribing medicines (notably, those treatments involving family planning) that might not square with their moral beliefs. Obama et al. promise to prioritize dismantling of this healthcare legislative piece, initially by allowing the Democratic controlled Congress to hamper its implementation. | LINK

• FDA requires warnings about suicidality risk with certain popular anticonvulsants.
• Physician in key role in Medicare scam gets 30 years.
• Healthcare providers’ “conscience rule” to take effect, courtesy George W. Bush.
• Editorial: Barack Obama must not “bow to” the demands of abortion rights supporters.
• The state of Utah gets ready to overhaul its healthcare delivery systems.

A healthcare imprimatur of sorts for the outgoing Bush Administration?  The current lame-duck president’s ‘Patients’ Right of Conscience’ regulation, which proposes that healthcare providers may withhold services based upon their moral beliefs, would probably do more to hurt patients than help — even those religious conservative patients who are the regulation’s intended targets.  Unsurprisingly, the major medical associations have swiftly come out against such proposed actions, citing patient safety — especially in emergency cases. Read the rest of this entry »