Media Mentions: DMS & DHMC in the News
Among the people and programs coming in for prominent media coverage in recent months was John Head, an emeritus professor of surgery. He was among several surgeons quoted in the New York Times about music in the OR. "I'm not particularly fond of music in the OR," he said, "but if there is music I prefer it to be classical especially the symphonies of Beethoven and Brahmsand reasonably sedate. There's a rhythm to operating, and it shouldn't be broken by anything that has a different rhythm."
New Hampshire organizations are used to lots of media attention
before the Granite State's first-in-the-nation primary. A DMS
administrator came in for some of that attention,
in a story in the Association of American Medical
Colleges' Reporter. "'We've been taking advantage
of the opportunity to have such good access
to the campaignsparticularly Bill Bradley's
campaign, because we have some good political
ties there,' says Adam Keller, associate dean and
COO of Dartmouth Medical School. 'This is one
of the best opportunities we could have to get the news out there
about what's important to usthe impact of the Balanced Budget
Act, the importance of more funding for biomedical research, and
the huge gap in access to care for the uninsured.'"
The Wall Street Journal was among many publications that took
note of a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association
which concluded, as the WSJ put it, that "patients
who got their primary medical care from
nurse practitioners fared just as well as those
treated by physicians. . . . In an editorial accompanying
the study, Harold Sox, a primary-care expert
at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, said,
among other things, . . . that the study was too
short to test the competence of the nurse practitioners
across a broad spectrum of care. Nevertheless, he called the
study 'a remarkable accomplishment, the most ambitious and wellexecuted
comparison of nurse practitioners.'"
The Boston Globe carried a report about a strain of rice genetically engineered to contain extra vitamin A. "What the researchers did was not transfer a single gene, but the entire genetic pathway for producing beta-carotenethe precursor of vitamin A. . . . Health specialists estimate that 124 million children worldwide are deficient in vitamin A." The Globe said that Dartmouth biologist Mary Lou Guerinot had "called the work a 'technical tour de force,' considering that most traits engineered until now have only required introducing a single gene."
The Guardian of London reported on an unusual cohort of medical
volunteers at Dartmouth. "Subjects were
drawn by a notice on their medical school's bulletin
board: 'Volunteers with tattoos wanted for
participation in cancer experiments.'" The study
is being run by Harold Swartz, M.D., Ph.D., a professor
of radiology. "Swartz's idea
relies on the fact that India ink,
which gives tattoos their color,
contains particles of carbon."
The presence of carbon can
help determine the concentration
of oxygen in cells, using an
imaging technique called electron
paramagnetic spectroscopy; the medical value
lies in the fact that if tissues are well oxygenated,
radiation therapy of cancerous tumors is
much more effective. One of Schwartz's colleagues
had noted that "the perfect experimental subjects
were already walking around the building."
The New York Times recently explored the fiscal woes of New York City's hospitals: "'It is starting to look like the collapse of the Soviet empire,' said Megan McAndrew Cooper, the editor of the Dartmouth Atlas, which tracks regional variations in health care. 'Everyone in New York had to have the best of everything. There was no cooperative planning or constraint on resources, and now all of a sudden . . . things are getting very wobbly.'"
The Times also turned to Dartmouth for comment
in a story titled "When physicians double as
businessmen." Many of those quoted didn't see
any conflict in doctors having financial ties to
their research. But the story said
"some experts were dismayed by
standards in the field. 'The conflicts
are just overwhelming,'
said Dr. John Wasson, a professor of
medicine at Dartmouth Medical
School. . . . 'If you can't trust the
opinion leaders and the socalled
experts and, even worse, in some cases the
studies themselves, what happens to the profession
and what happens to the patients?'"
The word that researchers in Oregon had "cloned a monkey by splitting an early-stage embryo and implanting the pieces into mother animals" was detailed on CNN.com. The Web site sought an assessment of the event from a DMS adjunct professor of community and family medicine: "'This is essentially the method of Brave New World,' said Ronald M. Green, an ethicist at Dartmouth College. 'This opens the prospect of mass identical replication.'"
When the noted Princeton economist Uwe
Reinhardt penned a commentary on managed
care for the Wall Street Journal,
he said that the concept of managing
care has been hobbled by
the lack of scientific evidence
about what constitutes optimal
care. "Two decades ago," he explained,
"pioneering research by
Dartmouth epidemiologist and
physician John Wennberg showed that the use of
health services and health spending per capita
varied widely across regions in the U.S. in ways
that could not be explained by health status or
clinical science."
An assistant professor of community and family
medicine was quoted recently in Newsweek's
"Health Notes" column. The
magazine mentioned a recent
study showing that vitamin B6
may relieve the symptoms of
premenstrual syndrome and
concluded by noting that "in a
review of the study for the
American College of Physicians,
Dr. Diane Harper of Dartmouth says that taking
50mg once or twice a day is a safe dose."
"Will we ever cure the common cold?" was one of the questions recently posed in the Wall Street Journal's "Expert Forecast" column. Among the prominent doctors asked for a response was Dartmouth Professor of Surgery C. Everett Koop, M.D. His answer: "If not the cold, then the symptoms. It's a very peculiar virus. It wouldn't surprise me if we could find a way to get rid of the symptoms, and if we could do away with that, people wouldn't care if they have a cold or not."
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