Bottom Line Health
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| THE STUDY
The study looked at the medical records of more than 5,000 women—ages 34 to 77—for up to eight years, and found that those who took 500 milligrams (mg) or more of acetaminophen daily were twice as likely to develop high blood pressure as women who did not take the drug.
Women ages 51 to 77 who took an average of 400 mg of ibuprofen daily were 80% more likely to develop high blood pressure than women of the same age who did not take this drug. Younger women (ages 34 to 53) who took the same dose were 60% more likely to develop high blood pressure, according to the study. |
Bill Sardi
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 Masood reviewed her medical records and found her breast tumor was less than 1 centimeter (half an inch) in size with no spread to lymph nodes. He questioned whether total mastectomy was the right decision for her. The patient responded by saying "No one ever discussed any other treatment option with me following my cancer diagnosis." [The Breast Journal 9: 69: 2003]
Even though 75-80% of newly diagnosed breast cancer patients have early-stage breast cancer and are eligible for lumpectomy, most women still undergo mastectomy. |
| Rhoden and Abraham Morgentaler at Harvard Medical School write:
In an attempt to ascertain whether testosterone replacement therapy ignites prostate cancer, the medical records at six urology practices were reviewed. The records of 20 men undergoing testosterone supplementation for sexual dysfunction or "rejuvenation" who were found to have prostate cancer after initiation of exogenous testosterone supplementation were analyzed. Prostate cancer was detected within 2 years of testosterone initiation in 11 men (55%) and from 28 months to 8 years in the remainder. |
Andreas Moritz
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 In one of the studies, researchers examined three years of data covering the medical records of over one million patients (data made available by the Kaiser Permanente Renal Registry in San Francisco). The average age of the subjects was 52 years. The research team specifically looked at the results of a blood test that measures the rate at which kidneys are able to filter waste from the bloodstream (glomerular filtration rate or GFR). The findings revealed that as GFR dropped, the risks of cardiovascular disease, stroke, hospitalization and death all increased sharply. |
| Their report, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in October 2004, covered the medical records of more than 4,400 Medicaid patients, averaging 15 years per patient. Approximately 1,475 subjects suffered cardiac arrest during the study period. When the complete medication use of each subject was analyzed, researchers came up with these results:
• The rate of sudden death from cardiac causes was twice as high among patients using erythromycin compared to subjects that didn't use the antibiotic. |
| According to a study of over 7,000 patients' medical records spanning eight years, if you take ibuprofen for any reason—say, arthritis pain relief—while engaged in aspirin therapy for heart disease, you are twice as likely to die from a heart attack or stroke because of the way these two powerful drugs interact. The study, which was conducted by Britain's Medical Research Council and published in The Lancet, was confirmed by another study published in the journal, Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, on April 5, 2007. |
Peter J. Whitehouse and Daniel George
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 Ideally, medical records should be sent ahead of you. You may be awash in medical forms depending both on what has been done ahead of time and on your insurance plan, but don't be afraid to ask questions: The staff is there to help you.
Once the clinical staff has processed your information, you will be taken into the examining room. Here, a nurse or aide will take your vital
It is important to remember that you, the patient, are in control of who is in the room with you. If you need a caregiver to be with you, you have the right to say so. |
Ray D. Strand
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 Most fibromyalgia patients come into my office toting a stack of medical records from several different doctors, because a diagnosis of fibromyalgia usually takes an average of seven to eight years to get! Talk about frustration! They have been tested from top to bottom with absolutely no abnormal findings. The only way to truly discern whether a patient has fibromyalgia is to do specific tender-point testing of eighteen predetermined areas. If eleven or more of these areas are significantly tender when only mild pressure is applied, the patient is diagnosed with fibromyalgia. |
Bottom Line Health
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| Using both telephone interviews and reviews of patients' medical records, the researchers collected data on approximately 6,700 patients in 12 metropolitan areas who had received care for 30 acute and chronic conditions between 1996 and 2000. Health care was assessed using 439 quality indicators, which was validated by 36 specialists who are considered leaders in their field.
No matter who you are, it's almost a flip of the coin as to whether you get the care that experts want for you.
Steven M. |
| With the current mandate for electronic medical records, you are going to have a hard time getting a film mammogram into an electronic medical record.
"This study makes it more reasonable to go for the investment now, because you get an immediate clinical payoff," he adds.
DON'T WAIT
All the experts agree that women need to get screened for breast cancer, and not wait for digital screening if it is not available in their area. |
Benjamin H. Natelson, M.D.
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 Very strict laws as to the confidentiality of medical records have been in effect since April 2003. Thus, you will have to sign a document authorizing the specialist to release your otherwise confidential information to another party, including your primary-care physician. While you are at it, you might as well ask him or her to send a copy of the letter to you. In contrast to the 1950s and 1960s, when doctors' notes were not available to patients, today you control access to your medical record. You decide who can and cannot see it. |
Peter h. Fraser and Harry Massey
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 Going through his medical records, he discovered that he had had one of the lowest magnesium blood counts ever recorded in England. He suffered from unrelenting chest pain, gallbladder tenderness, and swollen glands. His memory had deteriorated, and it took enormous effort to apply himself to any focused mental exercise. He was horrified to realize that for the past year he had been unable on most days to walk more than 100 yards before collapsing in exhaustion. He was essentially bedridden, and he was not prepared to live like that any longer. |
Devra Davis
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 When Hueper examined the medical records of these alleged venereal tumors, every one turned out to have been a scrotal tumor. The epidemic of scrotal cancer had not ended but was literally defined out of existence.
H ueper's career after DuPont was not a happy one. In a remarkable case of bad timing, he published his magnum opus just weeks after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. |
Shannon Brownlee
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 In 2001, a group of researchers from Harvard and Brown universities published a study that looked at the medical records of nearly four thousand Medicare patients from 1 7 3 hospitals located in five states. Some of the patients had undergone a balloon angioplasty; others had had bypass surgery. The researchers wanted to know if the treatment given to this randomly chosen group of Medicare patients was appropriate, according to the set of rules that heart specialists have worked out. |
| The research team then followed the patients, through their medical records, over the course of several years. They could see if the members of their cohorts in high-spending regions were more likely to receive high-quality care than those in low-spending regions—and were more likely to recover from their illnesses as a result. Two years—and hundreds of hours of number crunching—later, the study's findings surprised even Fisher. |
| In most hospitals, patient records are routinely kept in multiple places, with CT scans and X-rays in one department and medical records in another. During handoffs of patients between one shift of nurses and the next, or when patients move between floors, critical information is regularly lost. Sometimes it seems, as in my friend's case, as if nurses and doctors don't even read a patient's chart before deciding how to treat them. Home Depot does a better job of tracking a box of nails than your local hospital does in tracking you, the patient. |
Melody Petersen
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 Parke-Davis also paid doctors if they agreed to let corporate employees read their patients' medical records. Franklin learned physicians could earn fifty dollars for each patient's record, plus an additional sum to cover the doctor's cost of overhead.
In another program the company paid doctors to experiment on their patients by prescribing Neurontin in doses that were double the maximum recommended by the FDA. The executives aggressively pushed this program even though patients suffered more side effects as they took higher doses of Neurontin. |
| Rosemary remembered how she had thought it was odd for Virginia, out of the blue, to mail her personal medical records. Her sister had never done such a thing before. It was almost as if she had felt something was coming.
Unable to go out because of her grief, Rosemary sent her husband to Bauder Pharmacy, an independent drugstore near their home in Des Moines, to get the lengthy FDA-approved prescribing instructions for Vioxx. |
Gary Null and Amy McDonald
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 Michelle's parents might have brought their claim under this theory; according to her mother's testimony and medical records, she suffered an intermittent high fever, up to 106 degrees, and severe diarrhea following the shot.
However, before it agrees to compensate children for a so-called MMR encephalopathy, the court generally requires evidence that the child lost consciousness for an extended period following the shot. Michelle does not seem to have had a seizure or loss of consciousness. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| Electronic medical records can greatly reduce if not virtually eliminate instances of this type of error, along with many other mishaps, but most hospitals have yet to invest in the technology.) Busy specialists don't always consult one another directiy, even by phone, and it's almost unheard of for all the doctors involved in a single patient's care to gather together in one room and actually discuss how best to treat him.
And so each specialist focuses on the part of the body he or she knows best. |
| Led by Elizabeth McGlynn, a researcher with the RAND Corporation, the study involved combing through thousands of medical records for information about 439 indicators of the quality of health care. Did migraine sufferers get the right drugs? Did people who came to the hospital with a broken hip receive heparin to prevent a stroke or heart attack? Did elderly patients get a pneumonia vaccine when they were admitted to the hospital? Did diabetics receive counseling to improve their diets and get more exercise? |
| In the end, Redding Medical Center would be forced to shut down its cardiac program, after Campbell finally succeeded in alerting the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice. medical records seized from the hospital were given to several outside heart specialists, who found that in twenty-seven years at Redding, Moon had catheterized some 3c,ooo patients, a huge number for just one physician working in a lightly populated, largely rural area. |
Gary Null and Amy McDonald
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| Luanne Pennesi requested my grandson's medical records. She felt the child's parents and I would learn and benefit from a Gary Null lecture. At that time my grandson's x-ray showed two frightening spots on his lungs.
We spoke to Gary. He suggested the boy take specific supplements, and emulsified cod liver oil. A month and a half later a new x-ray revealed clear lungs, no spots. Today my grandson is seven years old. He is home schooled. His health continues to be good. This experience changed many of our concepts. People have tools for health and healing. There is much to learn. |
Bottom Line Health
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| This was borne out by the survey, which found that the medical records of 38% of the patients had no information on exactly when the stroke started.
Warning signs of a stroke include dizziness, sudden weakness on one side of the body and headache.
Another reason tPA may not have been given is that hospitals need time to diagnose stroke patients before administering any drugs.
"Ideally, the target is that when patients arrive at the hospital, tPA should be given within an hour," Reeves says. |
Gary Null and Amy McDonald
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| My procedure is to first collect all the medical records that the person has accumulated up to that time, so I don't have to repeat any tests that have already been done. If some things have obviously been missed, then I try to fill in the gaps. There are labs around the country that do a pretty good job of looking for parasites, candidiasis, low magnesium, and other disorders that are either not done or done poorly by conventional labs. |
Ann M. Coulston and Carol J. Boushey
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 Weight Gain Patterns
A weight gain grid in the medical records helps to evaluate weight gain progress. It is helpful to identify inadequate weight gain that may be related to restriction of food intake. Guidelines for weight gain recommendations are given in Table 2 [30].
VI. PHARMACOLOGICAL AGENTS
Pharmacological therapy is added to nutrition therapy when women with GDM are unable to achieve or maintain target blood glucose levels and/or when fetal growth rate is above normal [8, 61].
A. |
Peter Radetsky
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 Missing medical records. Jerry Phillips's complaint that records of his treatment for a possible nerve-gas attack were destroyed resembles the experience of many vets. Dean Lund-holm, a Santa Cruz, California, reservist who served as a prisoner-of-war guard, says he spent several days unconscious in the hospital while in the Gulf, but that "now all files pertaining to that seem to have disappeared." Another veteran claims that medical records for his entire unit are missing. Some claim they saw medical records being burned and that some of their test results have been classified. |
T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D. and Thomas M. Campbell II
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 By watching who got heart disease and who didn't, and comparing their medical records, the Framingham Heart Study developed the concept of risk factors such as cholesterol, blood pressure, physical activity, cigarette smoking and obesity. Because of the Framingham Study, we now know that these risk factors play a prominent role in the causation of heart disease. Doctors have for years used a Framingham prediction model to tell who is at high risk for heart disease and who is not. |
| In the search for answers, the National Heart Institute decided to follow a population over several years, to keep detailed medical records of everybody in the population and to see who got heart disease and who didn't. The scientists headed to Framingham, Massachusetts.
Located just outside of Boston, Framingham is steeped in American history. European settlers first inhabited the land in the seventeenth century. Over the years the town has had supporting roles in the Revolutionary War, the Salem Witch Trials and the abolition movement. |
Alex Steffen
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 Recognizing that doctors already possess the tools to make people better, but that those tools would be more useful in the hands of patients, Kumar created Ca:sh, an electronic handheld gadget that contains medical records and treatment information. Ca:sh is simple enough to be used by children and cheap enough to be carried by traveling nurse-midwives in places like India, where health care is often best provided on patients' home turf. |
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