Scientists have long known what causes sickle-cell disease and its devastating effects: a single mutation in one errant gene. But for decades, there has been only modest progress against an inherited condition that mainly afflicts people of African descent. With advances in gene therapy, that is quickly changing — so much so that scientists have… Read More »
For most cancer patients, medical tests and examinations don’t end with the completion of therapy, even if their cancer has gone into remission. They will be due for several follow-up appointments, which can include blood tests, imaging tests and other exams as part of a surveillance protocol to detect possible relapse. One of the regular… Read More »
They are patients with diseases that mystify doctors, people whose symptoms are dismissed as psychosomatic, who have been given misdiagnosis upon misdiagnosis. They have confounded experts and have exhausted every hope save one. And so they wind up in the Undiagnosed Diseases Network, a federally funded project that now includes 12 clinical centers, including one… Read More »
By KIP SULLIVAN JD On the morning of December 21, I opened my copy of the New York Times to find an op-ed that said almost exactly what I had said in a two-part article The Health Care Blog posted two weeks earlier. The op-ed criticized the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP), one of dozens of… Read More »