Read article – Quotes H. Gilbert Welch, professor of medicine, community and family medicine, and of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, about how getting your own blood tests is part of the larger negative trend—testing people who aren’t really sick. The article also quotes Norman Paradis, professor of medicine, who calls the model of offering a wide assortment of tests a recipe for disaster.

Read article – Steven Woloshin, professor of medicine, community and family medicine, and of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, is quoted about how press releases, popular media, and even some journal articles routinely inflate expectations for future therapies based on early findings that probably will never turn into cures. “This is a problem throughout medical research and reporting on medical research,” says Woloshin.

Read article – Quotes Sunny Jung Kim, postdoctoral fellow at the Dartmouth Psychiatric Research Center, who co-authored a recent study on health advertorials, a form of native advertising made to look like reported content in a publication or on television, and found that they work to deceive their viewers and lower consumer awareness.

Read article – James Leiter, professor of physiology and neurobiology and of medicine, who was the lead investigator of the study that found serotonin, is quoted about a neurotransmitter in the brain, shortens periods of apnea and promotes inspiration.

Read article – Cites figures from the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, which showed average Medicare spending in 2012 for a Rochester, Minn., resident was $7,325, compared to the $11,239 average in Jacksonville, Fla.

Read article – Quotes Lisa Schwartz, professor of medicine, community and family medicine, and of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice (TDI), about how she and colleague Steven Woloshin, professor of medicine, community and family medicine, and of TDI, reviewed the studies that weight loss drug Contrave’s manufacturer, Orexigen Therapetutics, used to gain approval of the drug from the Food and Drug Administration. “The studies show that Contrave caused many people to feel sick,” says Schwartz.

Read article – Feature article about Ana Rodriguez-Villa, a second year Geisel student, and Brendin Beaulieu-Jones, ’13, also a second-year med student at Geisel, who co-founded the group Bridges, a peer support group for LGBT teens, last April as part of the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship. As Schweitzer fellows, Rodriguez-Villa and Beaulieu-Jones have developed a curriculum for training first- and second-year medical students to work with LGBT individuals in a clinical setting.

Read article –  Article features Jeffrey DeFlavio, Geisel ’14, about research he conducted as a medical student at Geisel that examined why more doctors don’t treat substance abuse. He took a survey of family physicians in New Hampshire and Vermont and found that, while a majority of the respondents routinely saw opioid-addicted patients, there were barriers. “What was interesting was that they overwhelmingly felt obligated to treat addiction,” says DeFlavio. “But they said they didn’t know how to treat it, their staff didn’t want to treat it and it wasn’t paying enough to do it.” DeFlavio founded a group of innovative addiction clinics that serve patients in several states.

Read article (log in required) –  David Jevsevar, chair and assistant professor of orthopaedic surgery and American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons spokesperson, discusses a new study that found that an “unacceptably high” risk for failure and revision surgery associated with a commonly used metal-on-metal hip implant may be partly attributable to the use of components that were outside of stated manufacturing tolerances. Jevsevar was not involved in the study.

Read article – A new study from the Geisel School of Medicine, the National Cancer Institute, and the state health departments in New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont, recently found that drinking water from private wells in northern New England may increase the risk of bladder cancer. For the past 50 years, rates of bladder cancer in men and women in northern New England have been about 20 percent higher than those in the rest of the country. The study finds the high cancer rates correlate with high rates of arsenic in private wells.