Sometimes doctors choose to do surgery not because it's preferable to other treatments but because they get reimbursed for it, a new study suggests. Researchers looked at patients with a narrowed artery in the neck, a condition called carotid artery stenosis that can be treated with surgery or managed with medicine and lifestyle changes. The choice is often a judgment call. Some were treated in a fee-for-service system, which pays doctors for every procedure they do. Others were treated by doctors on salary at a military hospital. After adjusting for socioeconomic and other variables, they found that overall, patients in the fee-for-service system were 63 percent more likely to have surgery than those in the salary system.
Women lose sight after stem cell procedures
Three women suffered severe, permanent eye damage after stem cells were injected into their eyes in an unproven treatment, doctors reported in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. One, 72, went completely blind from the injections, and the others, 78 and 88, lost much of their eyesight. The women had macular degeneration, an eye disease that causes vision loss, and they paid $5,000 each to receive stem-cell injections in 2015 at a private clinic in Sunrise, Fla. Staff members there used liposuction to suck fat out of the women's bellies, and then extracted stem cells from the fat to inject into the women's eyes.
Morning people eat better than night owls
Morning people may instinctively choose a healthier diet than night owls do. Finnish researchers tracked the diets of men and women ages 25 to 74 and used a questionnaire to classify them as morning people or evening types. On weekdays, evening types ate less in the morning and tended to choose breakfast foods that were higher in sugar and lower in fiber, carbohydrates and fats, including saturated fat. By evening, the night owls were eating more sugar and fats than the morning people. On weekends, the differences were even greater. Evening people ate significantly more sugar and fats, had more irregular mealtimes, and ate meals and snacks twice as often as morning people.
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