Medicine’s mismatch

Twenty conditions account for 80% of healthcare expenditure and 70% of personal healthcare expenditure is on those with chronic disabilities. Yet our health services were designed for episodic interventions not chronic conditions. [link]


From the Science blog:
Day after day examples pile up of a government gone wild with incompetence and fraud — from drug safety, to voting machines, to using political hacks to set up democracy in Iraq.

Well, if you want to destroy government, first you have to make people lose confidence in it.

It’s working.


Nearly a third of hospital emergency visits are alcohol-related, and after midnight this figure can be more than two thirds.

Why not an “Alcohol Health Worker”?
Why are doctors not trained to notice the signals and to intervene?

In England, about £217 million is currently spent per year on specialist alcohol treatment, compared with the £20 billion estimated cost of alcohol misuse.