Publisher Health

Health Secretary Wes Streeting has said there is a “risk of disruption” in the NHS as he attempts to overhaul the service and reduce waste, but has promised long-term improvements.

The family of Brendan Costello gathered in the hospital half-light. He had overcome so much in life, but the profound damage to his brain meant he would never again be Brendan. It was time.Listen to this article with reporter commentaryBrendan had spent four months enduring three surgeries and a lengthy rehab after infections further destabilized his damaged spine. He had returned to his apartment on the Upper West Side in late December to begin reclaiming the life he had put on hold — only to go into cardiac arrest three weeks later and lose consciousness forever.His younger sister, Darlene, stayed by him in the intensive care unit at Mount Sinai Morningside hospital. She made sure that his favorite music streamed nonstop from the portable speaker propped near his bed. The gravelly revelations of Tom Waits. The “ah um” cool of Charles Mingus. The knowing chuckle of New Orleans jazz.The music captured Brendan: the dark-humored Irish fatalism flecked with hope and wonder. And yes, he used a wheelchair, but woe to anyone who suggested this somehow defined the man.After tests confirmed no chance of regaining consciousness, a wrenching decision was made. Brendan’s ventilator would be removed at 1 p.m. on Sunday, Jan. 19, five days after his collapse. He was 55.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

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In West Texas, some with severe illness have not been taken to a doctor until their conditions worsened, officials said.Struggling to contain a raging measles epidemic in West Texas, public health officials increasingly worry that residents are relying on unproven remedies endorsed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, and postponing doctor visits until the illness has worsened.Hospitals and officials sounded an alarm this week, issuing a notice explaining which measles symptoms warranted immediate medical attention and stressing the importance of timely treatment.“I’m worried we have kids and parents that are taking all of these other medications and then delaying care,” said Katherine Wells, director of public health in Lubbock, Texas, where many of the sickest children in this outbreak have been hospitalized.Some seriously ill children had been given alternative remedies like cod liver oil, she added. “If they’re so, so sick and have low oxygen levels, they should have been in the hospital a day or two earlier,” she said.The growing outbreak has spread to nearly 260 people in Texas. So far, 34 patients have been hospitalized, and one child has died. In neighboring New Mexico counties, the virus has sickened 35 and hospitalized two. Two cases in Oklahoma have also been linked to the outbreak.Texas health officials believe the true number of cases is far higher. In all, there have been 301 measles cases in the United States this year, the highest number since 2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Friday.Where U.S. Measles Outbreaks Are SpreadingAs new cases are reported, our maps and illustrations show the spread of the virus and how infections can run through a community.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

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Dr. Mehmet Oz, the TV celebrity, dodged queries about Republican plans to cut health insurance for the poor, and emerged unscathed on his ties to major industries.In a hearing on Friday, senators pressed Dr. Mehmet Oz, the TV celebrity nominated to head Medicare and Medicaid, on Republican-led proposals that would significantly affect the health care coverage for nearly half of all Americans.At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, Dr. Oz bantered with senators in a friendly atmosphere, joking about basketball and allegiances to college teams. He largely escaped tough questions from either side of the aisle, displaying his on-air charm as he deflected Democrats’ most pointed concerns about potentially radical changes in health coverage for not only those 65 and older but also for poor children.Many senators seemed distracted by the fierce debate over the Republicans’ budget deal to avert a government shutdown, and they dashed in and out of Dr. Oz’s hearing. But he is poised to sail through the Senate for confirmation as the next administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, an agency with $1.5 trillion in spending. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, made a big deal of his financial conflicts before the hearing. But at the session, she did not press him on those issues. Instead, she focused on his views about whether private Medicare plans are overcharging the government, an area where she and Dr. Oz seemed to agree on the need to tackle potential fraud and waste.Throughout the hearing, he displayed a facile knowledge of a variety of relevant agency issues, although he repeatedly reverted to stock answers that he would need to study the topic at hand more.Several lawmakers, mainly Democrats, tried to force Dr. Oz to express his views on the Trump administration’s goals to cut back on health care costs and agency budgets, but he repeatedly sidestepped those minefields.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

As the coronavirus spread, researchers worldwide scrambled to find ways to keep people safe. Some efforts were misguided. Others saved millions of lives.Until 2020, few Americans needed to think about how viruses spread or how the human immune system works. The pandemic offered a painful crash course. Sometimes, it seemed that the science was evolving as quickly the virus itself.So The New York Times asked experts to revisit the nightmare. Of the most significant public health measures introduced during Covid, which have held up scientifically, and which turned out to be wrongheaded?The question is particularly important now, because pandemics that could upend American lives are inevitable. One candidate has already surfaced: bird flu.Perhaps the biggest lesson learned, several experts said, is that recommendations during any pandemic are necessarily based on emerging and incomplete information. But during Covid, federal agencies often projected more confidence in their assessments than was warranted.Next time, the scientists said, officials should be more forthright about the uncertainties and prepare the public for guidance that may shift as the threat comes into clearer focus.Rather than promote preventive measures as infallible solutions, they should also acknowledge that no single intervention is perfect — though many imperfect measures can build a bulwark.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

The author of numerous studies, he urged patients to question their physicians and expressed concern about cancer treatment for older adults.Dr. Sheldon Greenfield, whose pioneering research found that older patients with breast and pancreatic cancer got subpar treatment and that patients who grill their doctors during consultations receive better care, died on Feb. 26 at his home in Newport Beach, Calif. He was 86.The cause was colon cancer, his daughter Lauren Greenfield said.Dr. Greenfield was a founder and director of the Center for Health Policy Research at the University of California, Irvine, and a leader of the Medical Outcomes Study, involving more than 22,000 patients and 500 physicians, which determined in 1986 that doctors often ordered exorbitant and unnecessary tests and referred patients to a specialist when a primary care doctor or a nurse practitioner could have delivered equally good care.Alan M. Garber, the president of Harvard University, praised Dr. Greenfield as “a towering figure in health care research.”“His influence extended more widely than even he could have known, through the Medical Outcomes Study and so much else,” Dr. Garber said in an email.In 1991, Dr. Greenfield and collaborators including his wife, Dr. Sherrie Kaplan, found that too many conversations about care are dominated by doctors. They recommended a protocol that included a 20-minute coaching session for patients before they consulted their physicians.“When doctors dominate the medical interview, patients don’t do as well as when the patient exerts more control,” Dr. Greenfield told The New York Times that year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

A new study found that fair prices for medications like Wegovy and Zepbound would be hundreds less per month than they are now.It’s easy to make a medical case for blockbuster weight loss drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound, which have been shown to prevent heart attacks and strokes and save lives.But for the employers and government programs being asked to pay for the medications, the financial case for them is less clear. Are the drugs’ benefits worth their enormous cost?The answer right now is no, according to a new study published on Friday in the journal JAMA Health Forum, by researchers at the University of Chicago.To be considered cost effective by a common measure used by health economists, the price of Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy would need to be cut by over 80 percent, to $127 per month, the researchers concluded. And Eli Lilly’s Zepbound would be cost effective only if its price fell by nearly a third, to $361 per month. (Zepbound warranted a higher price, the researchers said, because it produced greater benefits in clinical trials.)“There’s no doubt that the drugs are demonstrating tremendous health benefits,” said David Kim, a health economist at the University of Chicago and the senior author of the study, which was funded by government grants. “The problem is the price is too high.”There’s widespread hope that the drugs will effectively pay for themselves in the long run, by making patients healthier and preventing expensive medical bills. It’s not clear yet whether that will turn out to be true.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.