A person looking for information on what drinking alcohol means for their health will find a lot of contradictory research. There is, of course, mounds of evidence that excessive alcohol consumption is bad for you. But there are also many studies that indicate drinking alcohol in moderation may safeguard a person from some serious conditions, especially those related to heart health. The latest study tout the benefits of imbibing finds a modest amount of alcohol — one drink a day — can protect a person from heart failure later on in life. Scott Solomon, professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, is quoted.
President Barack Obama will urge Congress to spend U.S. taxpayers’ money for research in “precision medicine,” a burgeoning field of care in which treatments are tailored to an individual patient. Raju Kucherlapati, Paul C. Cabot Professor of Genetics, is quoted.
Harvard Medical School and the Dubai Healthcare City Authority have partnered to establish a center for training and research on health care and medical treatment in the United Arab Emirates, the University announced on Tuesday. David Golan, dean for basic science and graduate education and professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology, and Salmaan Keshavjee, associate professor of global health and social medicine, are quoted.
What Medicare gives with one hand, it’s taking away with another. Most government quality bonuses to hospitals this year are being wiped out by penalties issued for other shortcomings. Massachusetts Eye and Ear, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, is mentioned.
Stillbirth may seem to be rare, but it actually occurs in about 1 of every 160 pregnancies. Of these stillbirths, 10 to 20 percent occur during labor and delivery. But U.S. doctors can offer pregnant women little help in assessing their risk for stillbirth and even less help in preventing it. Ruth Fretts, assistant clinical professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, is quoted.
VSED, short for “voluntarily stopping eating and drinking,” is not unheard-of as an end-of-life strategy, typically used by older adults who hope to hasten their decline from terminal conditions. But now ethicists, lawyers and older adults themselves have begun a quiet debate about whether people who develop dementia can use VSED to end their lives by including such instructions in an advance directive. Susan Mitchell, professor of medicine, is quoted.
Boston Children’s Hospital has embarked on one of the nation’s most ambitious programs to integrate 3-D printing technology into medical care with the aim of avoiding surgical complications, reducing the length of operations, and ultimately cutting costs. The hospital has one printer buzzing 24 hours a day and will add two more, at the cost of $400,000 each, later this year. Peter Weinstock, associate professor of anaesthesia at Boston Children’s Hospital, is quoted. Joseph Madsen, associate professor of neurosurgery at Boston Children’s Hospital, and John Meara, associate professor of surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital, are mentioned.
More than 6,800 patients received the e-mails over the past three months telling them they had been approved for the state’s medical marijuana program. The e-mails contained detailed personal information — a practice specialists say constituted a clear violation of privacy standards. John Halamka, professor of emergency medicine and chief information officer at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, is quoted.
Following a multiyear process of self-reflection and review, Jeffrey S. Flier, dean of the faculty of medicine at Harvard University, has announced the establishment of a new Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI). It will officially become a Quad-based department on July 1, 2015. Isaac “Zak” Kohane, co-director of the HMS Center for Biomedical Informatics, director of the Countway Library of Medicine and the HMS Lawrence J. Henderson Professor of Pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital, will be the department’s inaugural chair.
