North Carolina makes med-mal data available
In this time of withdrawing consumer rights regarding avoidable medical mistakes, would requiring disclosure and public dissemination of physician malpractice data be welcome?
Currently, in Nevada, there is no such disclosure.
How often do we see physicians who our friends say are "good doctors?" Or when we go to the emergency room we are "referred" to the doctor on rotation? Would it serve the patient's interest to be able research the doctor they are considering? Well that is starting to happen in other states.
The Raleigh News & Observer (12/8, Garloch) reports, "For the first time, consumers can easily check whether North Carolina doctors have settled or lost medical malpractice claims or been convicted of crimes. The N.C. Medical Board announced Monday that it has expanded its Web site to include malpractice settlements or judgments and criminal records for its 35,000 licensed physicians and physician assistants. The expansion comes in response to a law passed by the General Assembly in 2007 that requires the board to publish malpractice payments, misdemeanor and felony convictions, hospital suspensions and discipline by medical boards in other states."
The fact of repeated impacts to the brain causing brain damage made news. A private university will pay $7.5 million to provide lifetime care to a former football player who suffered a severe brain injury in a 2005 game after an earlier concussion went untreated.
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over 200 billion nerve cells), and human brains vary between 1.25 kg and 1.45 kg (with an estimated 85 billion nerve cells). A honeybee's brain weighs only 1 milligram and contains fewer than a million nerve cells.
Education and brain experts discuss their experiences, challenges, and potential next steps to allow for the crossover from classroom to lab and lab to classroom. The concerns and hopes of those working in the field are presented in a summary of the roundtable discussions that served as the centerpiece of the summit.
The general pattern of brain atrophy resulting from Alzheimer's disease has long been known through autopsy studies, but exploiting this knowledge toward accurate diagnosis and monitoring of the disease has only recently been made possible by improvements in computational algorithms that automate identification of brain structures with MRI. The new methods described in the study provide rapid identification of brain sub-regions combined with measures of change in these regions across time. The methods require at least two brain scans to be performed on the same MRI scanner over a period of several months. The new research shows that changes in the brain's memory regions, in particular a region of the temporal lobe called the entorhinal cortex, offer sensitive measures of the early stages of the disease.