Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Longer Looks: The Lazarus Effect; Zenefits; Hospitals As Prisons; and John Oliver
The New York Times: Learning From The Lazarus Effect
For years, Grace Silva had experienced odd episodes with her throat — bouts of swelling and radiating pain that seemed to resolve with antibiotics — but her doctors couldn’t explain what was wrong. Finally, after a flare-up in the summer of 2010, Grace was referred to a specialist, an ear doctor who felt something amiss on the left side of her throat: a lump. The Silva family agreed that it was time to get Grace, then 54, to a thyroid specialist. Grace’s daughter Melanie tracked down the name of one at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a 90-minute drive from Grace’s brown clapboard split-level near New Bedford, Mass. In September 2010, the specialist delivered the diagnosis: anaplastic thyroid cancer. It was bad, he warned her, and she would need surgery. (Gareth Cook, 5/12)
Bloomberg Businessweek: Zenefits Was The Perfect Startup. Then It Self-Disrupted
Zenefits was everything Silicon Valley loved wrapped up in one company. It had a visionary founder. It tackled a stodgy industry ripe for disruption. The recurring commissions gave it a steady stream of revenue from the start. And Zenefits was the first in the health insurance software space, the Uber to its future competitors’ Lyft. The potential for greatness is what allowed Zenefits to expand from 15 employees to 1,600 in three years; raise $580 million in three fundraising rounds; and become one of Andreessen Horowitz’s biggest investments. Last year it was valued at $4.5 billion, which made it, in Valley parlance, a “unicorn” several times over. (Claire Suddath and Eric Newcomer, 5/9)
The New York Times: When Hospital Rooms Become Prisons
Michael (not his real name) had an entourage the second he walked in the door. His ankles were shackled to the bed. Police officers, nurses and sheriff’s deputies surrounded him. His blood pressure had been dangerously high and he was admitted to my service. Why was he in custody? People whispered softly as the collective speculation permeated the hallways. Was it armed robbery or murder? It shouldn’t have mattered — we are supposed to treat everyone the same. But it did. (Esrilia M. DeFilippis, 5/5)
The Atlantic: Why Doctors Still Need Stethoscopes
A Google Images search for “doctor” reveals essentially the same picture: a doctor wearing a crisply ironed white coat with a stethoscope draped, scarf-like, around the neck. The only difference between the images is the actual doctor—man or woman; white or black or Asian. The stethoscope sits like a fashion accessory on all of them, ear pieces over one shoulder, chest piece over the other. I grew up with a pediatrician father and never saw doctors wear their stethoscopes like this until shows like ER and Scrubs. (Andrew Bomback, 5/10)
The New York Times: An Old Idea, Revived: Starve Cancer To Death
The story of modern cancer research begins, somewhat improbably, with the sea urchin. In the first decade of the 20th century, the German biologist Theodor Boveri discovered that if he fertilized sea-urchin eggs with two sperm rather than one, some of the cells would end up with the wrong number of chromosomes and fail to develop properly. It was the era before modern genetics, but Boveri was aware that cancer cells, like the deformed sea urchin cells, had abnormal chromosomes; whatever caused cancer, he surmised, had something to do with chromosomes. (Sam Apple, 5/12)
Last Week Tonight With John Oliver: Scientific Studies
John Oliver discusses how and why media outlets so often report untrue or incomplete information as science. Video. (5/8)
The Atlantic: Autism Research’s Overlooked Racial Bias
Each Tuesday afternoon, five people bring their children to Rush University Medical Center, a few miles from downtown Chicago. They come from different parts of the city, from its suburban outskirts to its urban South Side. For the children, ages 8 to 14, it’s a weekly get-together led by two friendly women. The children talk about and practice sharing, asking others to play, dealing with skills such as losing and winning, and also learn to manage stress through deep breathing and other techniques. For the parents, it is a chance for their children to improve their social and communication skills with help from child psychologists. All the children are on the autism spectrum. All but one of the families are black or Latino. (Amy Yee, 5/5)
The New York Times: The Sisters Who Treat The Untreatable
At the beginning of the 20th century, sick Americans typically died at home. By the middle of it, they mostly died in hospitals. And yet this great transformation in the geography of death was, at first, of little interest to medical providers: In the 1960s, some doctors routinely chose not to inform terminal patients of their fate. Studies found hospitals stashing dying people at the ends of halls and largely ignoring them. Medicine, it was said, was about healing people. It had nothing to offer the already dying. That began to change with the broad acceptance of hospice, which spread in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s and turned the innovations of modern medicine toward helping those whose cures were beyond its reach. The physician Dame Cicely Saunders founded the first modern clinic in London; the term “hospice” had first been used by old sanctuaries for weary travelers. (Brooke Jarvis, photos by Gillian Laub, 5/12)
