Gear « Weekly Gravy

One in four doctors has been personally attacked or sexually harassed on social media, a new study finds. Women are more likely to be sexually harassed, while both men and women are attacked based on religion, race or medical recommendations, researchers say. Doctors received negative reviews, coordinated harassment, threats at work, public exposure of their personal information and threats of rape and death. Distressingly, this was reported before the 2020 pandemic. The survey of 464 U.S. physicians was conducted before the COVID-19 outbreak and highlight the intensity of online harassment of doctors. The situation has only gotten worse since the spring, the authors noted. “If anything, our data is likely an underestimate of the true extent of attacks and harassment post-pandemic since so many doctors started to advocate for public health measures during the pandemic and have been met with an increasingly polarized populace emboldened by leadership that devalues science and fact,” said senior author Dr. Vineet Arora, assistant dean for scholarship and discovery at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. The study also reported that 1 in 6 women doctors said they had been sexually harassed on social media. Study co-author Tricia Pendergrast, a second-year medical student at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, described the findings as worrisome. “We worry this emotionally distressing environment will drive women physicians off… read on > read on >

Telemedicine rapidly expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic as people turned to their phones and computers rather than leave their homes for health care. But some groups of people were left behind in the telemedicine boom, a new study reports. Middle-aged and older folks are much less likely to complete their scheduled telemedicine visits, as well as Medicaid recipients and those whose first language is not English, the researchers said. Many groups are also unable to take part in video visits, including middle-aged folks and seniors, women, Black and Hispanic people, and those with a lower household income, according to the study authors. The pandemic has revealed a “digital divide” in telemedicine care, with some people unable to take full advantage of the service because they either lack access to the technology or find it too daunting, said lead researcher Dr. Srinath Adusumalli. He’s a cardiologist and assistant professor of clinical medicine with the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. “Lots of the care we’ve historically delivered in person can be done via telemedicine, and therefore I do think telemedicine is here to stay,” Adusumalli said. “Our goal now is to start refining that process.” For this study, Adusumalli and his colleagues surveyed records for nearly 150,000 patients who scheduled telemedicine visits with Penn Medicine between mid-March and mid-May, 2020, at the height of… read on > read on >

Is your kid suddenly clamoring for a fast food meal or a sugary cereal you’ve never even heard of? He or she may have seen the product featured on a favorite “kid influencer” video. In a new study, researchers viewed the top 50 kid influencer videos on YouTube and found that 9 out of 10 featured unhealthy foods. Nearly 1 in 3 promoted a fast-food chain. But, what in the world is a kid influencer? If you have children, odds are you know at least one — or your kids do. Kid influencers are young online celebrities with large social media fan bases. They can earn big profits from ads and endorsements in their videos. The five most-watched influencers in this study have generated more than 48 billion views and 38.6 million subscribers through more than 10,000 YouTube videos posted through July 2019. Their average age? Just 7 years old. The most watched of these influencers is 9-year-old Ryan Kaji, whose video channel, “Ryan’s World,” has nearly 27 million subscribers. Published reports pegged his 2019 income at $26 million. His family started making videos of his reactions to unboxing new toys when he was just 3. “I think parents probably underestimate the effect of these videos for a few reasons: One is that kid influencers seem like everyday kids. They’re familiar and fun, but they… read on >

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, many doctors started providing care via telemedicine. Now, a new survey of people with type 1 diabetes suggests many like remote care and hope it continues in the future. Among the survey respondents who had a telemedicine visit during the pandemic, 86% found the remote appointments useful, and 75% said they planned on having remote appointments in the future, according to the Swiss study. “COVID really forced the issue of access to telemedicine. There were a lot of restrictions that made it difficult to access telemedicine in the past that were lifted with COVID. But will they remain available?” said Dr. Mary Pat Gallagher, director of the Pediatric Diabetes Center at NYU Langone Health in New York City. “It’s quite clear from my clinical experience that people really like this and would prefer it. I would like this to continue to be an option for our families,” added Gallagher, who was not involved in the current research. People with type 1 diabetes need to take multiple daily insulin shots or receive insulin via an insulin pump because they don’t make enough insulin on their own. Insulin is a hormone that ushers sugar from foods into the body’s cells for fuel. Replacing the body’s natural insulin is a balancing act, and insulin doses often need to be adjusted throughout a person’s… read on >

Telemedicine might help people with stubbornly high blood pressure get their numbers down — and possibly lower their risk of heart disease and stroke in the long run, a new study suggests. Doctors already recommend that people with high blood pressure use a home monitor to track their numbers. But research suggests that home readings, alone, only make a small difference in getting the condition under control. “People really don’t have the agency to act [on those readings] on their own,” said Dr. Karen Margolis, executive director of research at the HealthPartners Institute in Minneapolis. And if there is no clear plan for what to do about high home numbers, she said, any issues may only come to light at the periodic doctor visit. So Margolis and her colleagues tested a “telemonitoring” program designed to give patients more help: Their home readings were sent electronically to a pharmacist within the health system who then had regular phone “visits” with the patients. Over the next 18 months, the tactic worked. Compared with patients on standard care, those in the telemonitoring program lowered their blood pressure by an extra 7 to 10 points, on average, the study found. And over five years, they were half as likely to suffer a heart attack or stroke, or develop heart failure, according to the report. That finding, Margolis said, fell… read on >

Drug use is common among people taking part in virtual raves and happy hours during the coronavirus pandemic, a new study finds. “We explored whether stay-at-home orders changed how people use drugs — and it appears that drug use during virtual gatherings is somewhat prevalent among the party-going population we studied,” said study author Joseph Palamar. He’s associate professor of population health at NYU Langone Health in New York City. The researchers conducted online surveys in April and May 2020 with 128 New Yorkers who said they attend electronic dance music parties and reported recent drug use. About 56% said they had attended virtual raves and about 70% attended virtual happy hours during the pandemic. Of those, more than one-third said they had used illegal drugs during the events, including 41% of virtual rave attendees and 34% who attended virtual happy hours. Seven out of 10 participants used alcohol, and 30% said they used marijuana during both types of events, the survey found. Use of other drugs was less common. At virtual raves, about 9% used ecstasy, 7% used LSD and about 4% used cocaine. Slightly more than 3% of virtual happy hour attendees used cocaine and/or ketamine. The findings suggest that virtual dance parties and nightclub events could be an opportunity for drug use outreach and education, the researchers noted in a university news… read on >

Cellphone activity could be used to monitor and predict spread of the new coronavirus, researchers say. They analyzed cellphone use in more than 2,700 U.S. counties between early January and early May to identify where the phones were used, including workplaces, homes, retail and grocery stores, parks and transit stations. Between 22,000 and 84,000 points of publicly available, anonymous cellphone location data were analyzed for each day in the study period. Counties with greater declines in workplace cellphone activity during stay-at-home orders had lower rates of COVID-19, according to findings published Aug. 31 in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine. Researchers said their findings suggest that this type of cellphone data could be used to better estimate COVID-19 growth rates and guide decisions about shutdowns and reopenings. “It is our hope that counties might be able to incorporate these publicly available cellphone data to help guide policies regarding reopening throughout different stages of the pandemic,” said senior study author Dr. Joshua Baker, an assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. “Further, this analysis supports the incorporation of anonymized cellphone location data into modeling strategies to predict at-risk counties across the U.S. before outbreaks become too great,” he added in a university news release. Baker said it also may be possible to use cellphone data to forecast hotspots and take… read on >