A health-insurance company has announced a large-scale experiment involving consciousness. This is the experiment: if any particular surgical procedure lasted too many minutes, the insurance company will refuse to pay for anesthesia. The company is Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield. On November 1, 2024, the company announced: “Beginning with claims processed on or after February […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them: Wrong, wrong, wrong — The Journal of Patient Safety has a new report called “Insurance claims for wrong-side, wrong-organ, wrong-procedure, or wrong-person surgical errors: A retrospective study for 10 years“. Something is a little off even with […]
A tragic interplay of beauty and death led two medical professionals to write this alert for their peers: “Brazilian Butt Lift-Associated Mortality: The South Florida Experience,” Pat Pazmiño [pictured here] and Onelio Garcia, Jr., Aesthetic Surgery Journal, vol. 43, no. 2, February 2023, pp. 162–178. The authors report: Although BBL-related morbidity is generally associated with […]
“Winston Churchill: Inguinal Hernia Repair on 11 June 1947,” by J. Allister Vale and John W. Scadding,” is one of the research studies featured in the article “Medical Research: Sarsaparilla, Nose, Churchill’s Hernia“, in the special Formulas & Recipes issue of the magazine (Annals of Improbable Research). Read the article online. And if you like, […]