About one third of these patients, some of which were homeless, were given one-way bus tickets to cities in California. About 200 of the 1,500 mentally ill patients were sent to Los Angeles County, 150 of whom arrived in downtown L.A. Since 2008, patients were bused to cities in every continental US state, even though some had no family, friends or housing at their destination. After the Sacramento Bee published an exposé on the dumping practices of the Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital, the city of Los Angeles announced it would launch a probe investigating the matter.“It’s just an abhorrent practice,” Gil Cedhillo, a candidate for the L.A. City Council and a former state senator, told the Bee. “You can’t just take someone from a facility and dump them downtown.”L.A. has one of the strictest patient-dumping laws in the US, which was adopted in 2007 after a homeless schizophrenic was found walking the streets in his hospital gown while still connected to a catheter bag.The Bee obtained bus receipts from the Nevada Division of Mental Health and Developmental Services and found that the hospital sent its patients away on Greyhound buses, equipped with a small supply of medication and several bottles of a nutritional supplement that only lasted a few days.Health officials claim that most of the patients were sent off to cities where they had a place to stay, but the Bee discovered several cases in which mentally ill patients were forced to go to cities that they had no connection to.James Flavy Coy Brown, a 48-year-old homeless man who had received treatment at Rawson-Neal, was put on a bus that dropped him off in Sacramento – even though he had never been there and knew no one in the city.The former psychosis patient had only been treated for three days before doctors sent him out of state, despite his protests.“I said, ‘I don’t want to leave Nevada,’” Brown told ABC News. “[The doctor] said, ‘California sounds like a really nice state. I think you’ll be happy there.’”Equipped with a $306 one-way bus ticket, six Ensure nutrition shake bottles, and a three-day supply of psychiatric medications, he was sent away, only to end up on the streets of Sacramento – without medication. The man had no Social Security card, food stamp card or Medicaid card, and checked into a homeless shelter, feeling the effects of medication withdrawal and the return of his psychosis.“If I don’t take my medicine, I get really confused and I start hearing voices in my head, and they tell me to, like, jump off a bridge or to do something to purposefully get arrested or go to prison or jail,” he said. The Bee claims that as a result of its initial exposé last month, the hospital modified its procedures to require dispatched patients to be accompanied by a chaperone when bused out of state. In response to the investigations, Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval also said that state officials have implemented a new policy that requires at least two physicians and a hospital administrator to approve a dispatch order – rather than just one physician.Still, the Joint Commission, an independent agency that certifies US hospitals, is considering pulling Rawson-Neal’s accreditation for its history of patient-dumping. The city attorneys in L.A. and San Francisco have also launched probes into the hospital’s practices. If the allegations are true, Rawson-Neal would lose federal funding and face steep financial penalties.L.A. City Attorney Carmen Trutanich and his team are currently scouting out former patients to see if they were released in violation of the city’s ordinance against patient-dumping.“This is 150 people allegedly on the streets of L.A.,” Trutanich said, referencing the number of mentally ill patients that the hospital sent to the city. “We’re already stretched as it is.”But if Rawson-Neal is found guilty, the hospital could be convicted of a criminal misdemeanor and charged a hefty fine. … Read More
NHS may collapse unless elderly give up hospital beds – British MP
Lamb said that the NHS is under huge pressure from an ageing population, with the number of elderly patients suffering chronic and complex health problems growing and that tackling it would be “the challenge of the 21st century.”“Accident and Emergency [A&E] units are under pressure, ambulances are carrying more patients than they should, significant numbers of people are in hospital who should be cared for elsewhere. The system is becoming dysfunctional and we need to do something about it,” Lamb told the Telegraph.While one of Britain’s most senior A&E doctors, Dr. Cliff Mann, from the College of Emergency Medicine, said that they had begun to feel like “war zones,” and that many doctors were turning their backs on emergency medicine. The current funding system where hospitals have a financial incentive to hang on to patients is at the heart of the problem and currently there is no reward for a hospital to get patients to leave.In an attempt to address the issue, minsters will announce Tuesday plans to co-ordinate NHS services and councils to make sure than more is done to organize home-help for elderly patients or make basic adaptations to their home so that they can return there rather than languishing in hospitals.A series of pilot schemes will be set up to test more joined up ways for health and social care providers to work together. The plan is that the schemes will be expanded to every part of the country by 2015.“At the moment the system is horribly fragmented and that means bad care – distress, crises occurring that could be avoided, massive disruption to people’s lives. If we carry on as we are the system will collapse,” said Lamb.Hospital regulators have also announced a review of the NHS funding system to encourage hospitals to release patients earlier.Other plans which could be implemented under the review include giving elderly patients their own personal NHS worker who would manage all their care needs including home help and physiotherapy, as well as medical treatment.While the system of paying doctors for completing specific activities will also be overhauled so that they are only rewarded for actual improvements in a patient’s health.Lamb’s announcement comes just days after David Prior, the head of the UK’s Care Quality Commission (CQC), the leading UK health watchdog, said that acute beds for the elderly must be closed and that admissions through A&E are out of control.Robert Francis QC, who conducted the review into failings at the Mid-Staffordshire NHS trust, which led to the deaths of 1,200 people between 2005 and 2009, told the Nursing Times that while doctors and hospital managers understood that serious changes need to be made, certain members of the nursing profession were not taking the problem seriously enough. … Read More
Imprisoned by Insanity (RT Documentary)
http://www.youtube.com/v/ZDWD_j7oMTs?version=3&f=videos&app=youtube_gdata View article - Imprisoned by Insanity (RT Documentary)
‘Nobel-worthy’ medical breakthrough: Antibiotics could cure 40% of back pain patients
Scientists hail medical breakthrough by which half a million UK patients could avoid major surgery and take antibiotics instead Up to 40% of patients with chronic back pain could be cured with a course of antibiotics rather than surgery, in a medical breakthrough that one spinal surgeon says is…
Breast implants may delay cancer diagnosis: study
Breast implants may delay cancer diagnosis in women, said a study Wednesday that urged a thorough probe into the potential health risks of this type of cosmetic surgery. In a review of 12 earlier studies of breast cancer patients, a team of epidemiologists from Canada found that women with implants…
Lund study backs coffee against cancer theory
A new study from researchers at Lund University in southern Sweden has shown that cancer patients who drink 2 or more cups of coffee per day have a lowed incidence of relapse than those who don’t. … Read More
Patients, Patents, and the Supreme Court
Should human genes be patentable? That’s the
central question in Association for Molecular Pathology v.
Myriad Genetics, Inc., a case argued before the U.S. Supreme
Court this week. The lawsuit was organized by the American Civil
Liberties Union on behalf of
several professional organizations that have long opposed such
patents, which the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has been
granting since the 1980s. Patent law is arcane, and arguments about
it can sound a lot like haggling over the number of angels that can
dance on the head of pin. But in this case, it is tens of billions
of dollars in research, products, and profits that are doing the
dancing.
At the issue are several patents related to two breast cancer
genes, BRCA 1 and BRCA 2. In the 1990s, researchers at Myriad
identified and isolated two genes in which certain mutations
dramatically increase the risk of breast and ovarian cancer. The
company then offered a product, called BRACAnalysis, which compares
patients’ BRCA genetic sequences to the company’s reference
sequence to identify the mutations. Armed with the knowledge that
they are at greater risk, patients can then engage in protective
actions ranging from more frequent mammograms and ultrasound
examinations to having their breasts and ovaries surgically
removed. The court must decide if Myriad is merely using products
of nature (which cannot be patented) or if it has invented a “new
and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter,
or any new and useful improvement thereof” (which can).
Why do the plaintiffs want to invalidate human gene patents? As
a matter of public policy, it’s mainly because they believe such
patents impede rather than speed valuable research and development.
(The Association for Molecular Pathology, for example,
cites estimates that “about 20 percent of the human genome is
under patent,” and
argues that “scientific research has been delayed, limited or
even shut down due to concerns about gene patents.”) As a matter of
law, the groups argue that a gene isolated by Myriad conveys the
same genetic information as a gene found in a human body, and that
it thus “represents the same laws of nature as genomic DNA.”
Myriad, the ACLU concludes, “is in effect arguing that it may
obtain a patent on a product or law of nature itself if it finds a
new use for it.”
In its
brief, Myriad counters that no one would contest a patent on a
new chemical that could be applied to a blood or tissue sample to
detect a higher cancer risk. “That is what Myriad’s patented
molecules are,” the company claims, “and they were never available
to the world until Myriad’s scientists applied their faculties to a
previously undistinguished mass of genetic matter in order to
identify, define, and create the isolated DNA molecules.”
Who’s right? It’s illuminating to consider how the patent office
applies the product of nature doctrine to issuing a patent. In one
training
example, the office notes that exposure to sunlight is known to
affect some people’s moods. If someone tried to patent a method for
treating seasonal affective disorder that amounts to exposing a
patient to sunlight, the application would be rejected, since it
“is no more than the law of nature plus telling people to ‘apply
it.’” Nor would the office issue a narrower patent on exposing the
patient to a source of white light, since the sun is also a source
of white light. But it would patent a treatment in which a
patient is precisely positioned for a specified length of time near
a white light source from which ultra-violet rays have been
filtered. In fact, just such a treatment was patented
in 2002.
So are Myriad’s molecules more like advising a patient to sit in
the summer sunlight or more like creating a contraption that
exposes him to white light in the depths of winter? I am not patent
lawyer, but it seems to me that gene patents are more like the
latter—that the isolated DNA molecules are the result of human
ingenuity and are composed, manufactured, and improved, not merely
discovered or found.
The public policy issue raises a different question: Do gene
patents promote progress, or do they impede discovery and
invention? In its brief, Myriad makes the uncontested point that
since its BRCA patents were issued, 18,000 researchers have
conducted studies involving those genes, published over 8,000
scientific papers, and conducted over 130 clinical trials. That’s a
lot of progress, and the evidence that the patents have prevented
still more progress from occurring is slim. In a recent,
comprehensive analysis,
Christopher Holman, a professor at the University of
Missouri–Kansas City Law School, deflates the claim that 20 percent
of human genes are patented and that this constitutes a roadblock
to newer genetic technologies, such as testing based on whole
genome sequencing.
The claim that 20 percent of human genes are patented comes from
a single
article in Science magazine in 2005. The
Science authors assumed that the mention of a gene’s DNA
sequence in patent claim was equivalent to patenting the gene, but
in most cases that actually isn’t so. What’s more, sequencing a
whole genome does not require the use of isolated genes. It
involves running a person’s DNA through a detection device to
determine the specific order of DNA base pairs; these data are then
compared with publicly available studies describing the various
effects of the identified sequences on an individual’s health and
well-being. In very few instances would preexisting patents prevent
this.
Holman concludes that “there is no empirical support for the
widespread notion that 20 percent of human genes are patented in
manner that would be inevitably infringed” by modern genetic
testing technologies. In fact, whole genome sequencing will soon be
cheaper than diagnostic tests, such as Myriad’s, that depend on
patented genes.
In the meantime, declaring human gene patents invalid would
likely slow progress in the creation of new medical treatments. As
Holman notes, the “biotechnology industry has invested heavily in
life-saving products based on the expectation that effective patent
protections are available for innovations in this field.” During
oral arguments, Justice Antonin Scalia asked the highly relevant
question of the ACLU attorney: “Why would a company incur massive
investment if it—if it cannot patent?” The lawyer lamely responded
that scientists might do such work “because they’re curious,”
“because they want a Nobel Prize,” and because they would “get
enormous recognition.” Scalia drily replied, “Well, that’s lovely.”
Scalia asked the right question; for the sake of future patients’
well-being, let’s hope a majority of the court comes up with the
right answer.
Disclosure: I am still a card-carrying member of the
ACLU. … Read More
