(1) Hospitals Look to Nuclear Tool to Fight Cancer
There is a new nuclear arms race under way — in hospitals.
In Loma Linda Medical Center's fixed beam treatment room, where brain and eye tumors are treated, a machine is readied for a patient. The patient's head will be immobilized by the mask at left.
Medical centers are rushing to turn nuclear particle accelerators, formerly used only for exotic physics research, into the latest weapons against cancer.
Some experts say the push reflects the best and worst of the nation’s market-based health care system, which tends to pursue the latest, most expensive treatments — without much evidence of improved health — even as soaring costs add to the nation’s economic burden.
(2) Finding Alzheimer’s Before a Mind Fails
Ms. Kerley is part of an ambitious new scientific effort to find ways to detect Alzheimer’s disease at the earliest possible moment. Although the disease may seem like a calamity that strikes suddenly in old age, scientists now think it begins long before the mind fails.
“Alzheimer’s disease may be a chronic condition in which changes begin in midlife or even earlier,” said Dr. John C. Morris, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Washington University in St. Louis, where Ms. Kerley volunteers for studies.
But currently, the diagnosis is not made until symptoms develop, and by then it may already be too late to rescue the brain. Drugs now in use temporarily ease symptoms for some, but cannot halt the underlying disease.
Many scientists believe the best hope of progress, maybe the only hope, lies in detecting the disease early and devising treatments to stop it before brain damage becomes extensive. Better still, they would like to intervene even sooner, by identifying risk factors and treating people preventively — the same strategy that has markedly lowered death rates from heart disease, stroke and some cancers.
So far, Alzheimer’s has been unyielding. But research now under way may start answering major questions about when the disease begins and how best to fight it.
(3) Medicare Private Plan Abuses
Heavily subsidized private Medicare plans are continuing to prey on elderly Americans despite state, federal and industry efforts to stop them. It is yet another reason to rein in these operations by eliminating their unjustified subsidies.
These plans are a financial drag on Medicare as the government pays them about 12 percent more, on average, than the same services would cost in the traditional Medicare program. All too often, the private plans are an ethical horror as well. . . .
[U]nscrupulous insurance agents have tricked people into dropping traditional Medicare coverage and enrolling instead in private plans that do not meet their needs. Agents typically receive $350 to $600 for each patient they enroll in a private plan. Some try to boost sales by pretending to be Medicare officials, forging signatures or hiding the fact that a patient’s doctor will not be part of the private plan. Others barge into homes and use high-pressure tactics to push poor, semiliterate people into a private plan.
