Pedestrian deaths have surged on U.S. roads in recent years, and they are climbing again. Pedestrian deaths hit a 40-year high in 2021, and numbers for the first half of 2022 were up about 5% over the same period in 2021, according to a new Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA) analysis. It cites a variety of contributors, including heavier vehicles that are more likely to injure or kill people on foot. Roads, meanwhile, are designed to prioritize fast-moving traffic over the slower speeds that are safer for pedestrians, according to the GHSA. Many parts of the United States lack adequate sidewalks, crosswalks and lighting, the group noted. In addition, dangerous driving surged at the start of the pandemic and has not abated. “There is a pedestrian safety crisis on our roads, and it’s only gotten worse since the start of the pandemic,” Jonathan Adkins, chief executive officer of GHSA, said in an association news release. “A single roadway death is tragic. But it’s absolutely mind-boggling and heartbreaking that drivers are killing an average of 19 pedestrians every single day.” GHSA’s annual Spotlight on Highway Safety report is based on preliminary data from state highway safety offices. GHSA said the increase is even more alarming compared to 2019, before the pandemic. Between the first half of 2019 and 2022, pedestrian deaths surged 18%, the GHSA found.…  read on >  read on >

If you’re struggling to find ways to get a good night’s sleep, you may not want to use YouTube videos as a resource. Researchers found what they described as an alarming amount of medical misinformation in YouTube videos about sleep disorders. “What’s tricky is that so much of health information is very nuanced, and a lot of popular YouTube videos have clickbait and appeal to shorter attention spans,” said lead study author Rebecca Robbins. She is an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and investigator in the division of sleep and circadian disorders at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston. “People today often want very bite-sized pieces of information. However, science is fundamentally more nuanced than a one-liner or the 280 characters in a Twitter post,” Robbins explained in a hospital news release. More than 60% of U.S. adults say they used the internet to find health information, the study authors noted. To learn what they might find there, the investigators searched YouTube using terms such as “insomnia” and “sleep tips.” They sorted videos by views, labeling those with the most views as “popular.” The researchers then compared these popular videos to ones from credible sources. These were identified by a YouTube feature that places content from health care systems at the top of search results for health-related terms. Sleep experts then assessed the…  read on >  read on >

MONDAY, Feb. 27, 2023 (HealthDay News) – Federal officials plan to tighten access to drugs that have the potential for abuse by reinstating federal prescribing requirements that were loosened during the pandemic. The Biden administration will require that patients see a doctor in person, rather than through a telehealth appointment, to get a first prescription for opioid painkillers and the attention deficit hyperactivity (ADHD) drugs like Adderall and Ritalin. Prescription refills will still be allowed during telehealth appointments, however. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration also plans to tighten prescribing for less addictive drugs, such as codeine, Xanax, Ambien and buprenorphine. Those drugs will be allowed to be prescribed once via telehealth for a 30-day dose, but then patients will need to see a doctor in person to get a refill. Codeine is used to reduce pain and coughing. Xanax is an anxiety medication. Ambien is a sleep aid. Buprenorphine is used to treat opioid addiction. The DEA plans for this new rule to go into effect before May 11, when the COVID-19 public health emergency expires. “DEA is committed to ensuring that all Americans can access needed medications,” DEA Administrator Anne Milgram said in an agency news release announcing the changes. “DEA is committed to the expansion of telemedicine with guardrails that prevent the online overprescribing of controlled medications that can cause harm.” It will…  read on >  read on >

If you spend hours a day scrolling on your smartphone or tablet, you might get “tech neck.” “Humans are upright creatures, and our bodies aren’t designed to look down for long periods of time, which puts extra pressure on the cervical spine,” said Dr. Kavita Trivedi, associate medical director of the Spine Center at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. Americans spend about five hours a day on their cellphones and more on laptops and computers, Trivedi noted in a university news release. As a result, people can experience muscle stiffness, joint inflammation, pinched nerves, arthritis, and even bone spurs or herniated discs. A typical adult head weighs 10 to 12 pounds. Bending it at a 45-degree angle increases the force on the neck to nearly 50 pounds. “With repetition, that force can strain or injure the facet joints that connect our vertebrae,” Trivedi said. “When that happens, the surrounding muscles naturally tighten up to protect nearby nerves, which leads to inflammation, pain and knots in your neck — what is often referred to as tech neck.” Nonsurgical treatments for these injuries include medication and physical therapy, trigger point and steroid injections, nerve blocks and minimally invasive techniques such as radiofrequency ablation. Radiofrequency ablation is a procedure where radiofrequency waves are delivered to certain nerves, with the goal of interrupting pain signals to the brain.…  read on >  read on >

Email has become an easy and essential form of communication between patients and physicians — so much so that doctors are deluged daily with messages from patients. Now, some hospitals and health systems have started charging for doctors’ responses to those messages, depending on the amount of work needed to respond. Only a handful of health systems have started billing for these, and those that do say only a tiny percentage of doctor messages cost anything. But advocates say they’re concerned these charges will wind up limiting an option meant to expand patient access to health care. “We already know that even a small dollar amount of cost-sharing results in patients utilizing service less,” said Caitlin Donovan, senior director of the Patient Advocate Foundation. “I worry about anything that’s going to stop patients from contacting and communicating with their providers.” A new study suggests Donovan’s concerns are well-founded. Patient e-messages to University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) doctors slightly declined immediately after UCSF Health started charging for some responses, according to research published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “We started putting this language on our website, on our patient portal that said, as an FYI, there’s a potential that if your message meets the requirements to the clinical question, it may be billed,” said lead researcher A. Jay Holmgren, an assistant…  read on >  read on >

Despite distance and occasional technical glitches, a new study finds that most patients like seeing a surgeon for the first time via video. The study was published Jan. 19 in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons. “We see patients that live hours away. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it threw fuel on the fire of our telehealth program,” said study co-author Dr. Alexander Hawkins, associate professor of surgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn. “Across the entire health care system, we now do about 20,000 telehealth visits a month,” he said in a college news release. “Previously, there had been concerns about whether we could effectively communicate with patients remotely, but we found that patients are just as satisfied with telehealth visits as in-person appointments.” The study included 387 patients who participated in first-time visits between May 2021 and June 2022 at general surgery clinics across the Vanderbilt system. Researchers used a standard questionnaire to look at the quality of shared decision-making and asked patients and surgeons open-ended questions about their consultations. In all, 77.8% of patients had an in-person visit, while 22.2% saw their doctor remotely. Both groups reported high levels of quality communication during these appointments. Levels of shared decision-making and quality of communication were similar between remote visits and in-person care, the study found. In responding to the…  read on >  read on >

When people undergo surgery for broken arms or legs, they are often injected with prescription blood thinners to reduce their risk of developing potentially life-threatening blood clots in their lungs and legs. But a large, new study suggests it may be time to rethink this practice. It found that aspirin may be as effective as injections of low-molecular-weight heparin when it comes to staving off blood clots and their related complications. “Patients all over North America who come in for surgery for fractures are at risk for blood clots in their legs and lungs, and the standard treatment is injections of low-molecular-weight heparin in the hospital and for weeks after discharge,” said study author Dr. Robert O’Toole, chief of orthopaedics at the University of Maryland Medical Center’s R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore. “It’s a shot given twice a day, and patients hate it,” he said. These heparin shots also have a much heftier price tag than aspirin. The study included more than 12,000 patients with arm or leg fractures that required surgery or pelvic fractures regardless of treatment. They were treated at 21 trauma centers. Of these, half received injections of low-molecular-weight heparin twice a day, and half received low-dose baby aspirin twice daily. All participants were followed for 90 days to see how they fared. Outcomes were similar for both groups.…  read on >  read on >