Study: 20% In U.S. Struggle With Medical Bills

The families of one in five Americans had trouble paying medical bills in 2010, according to new research released this month. The good news: that percentage didn’t significantly increase between 2007 and 2010.

The numbers come from a report by the Center for Studying Health System Change, a nonpartisan organization founded in 1995 by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Although the percentage … read more »

Millimeter-wave scanners may constitute the hot new imaging modality, at least for industrial uses. German scientists have developed a scanner the size of a laser printer that can image all nonmetallic materials so precisely that it can distinguish between different types of rubber composites or chocolate fillings.

The device even has a cuddly name: SAMMI, short for Stand Alone MilliMeter wave … read more »

MRI beats SPECT for testing those suspected of suffering from coronary heart disease (CHD), according to a major United Kingdom study of heart-disease patients.

Among the possible CHD tests, SPECT is popular in part because it’s noninvasive. A five-year study by researchers at the University of Leeds in England, involving 752 patients, found that equally noninvasive MRI was better at both … read more »

A jury in Fairfax County, Virginia, decided that a radiologist should pay a 54-year-old woman $2.65 million for a 13-month delay in a breast cancer diagnosis, even though the woman continued to work and the delay caused no additional medical bills.

The plaintiff’s attorney, William E. Artz of Arlington, Virginia, said the verdict covered future medical expenses (which he estimated at … read more »

Low doses of ionizing radiation may not carry as much cancer risk as we’ve thought, according to researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California.

Breast-cancer researcher Mina Bissell, PhD, explained:
Our data show that at lower doses of ionizing radiation, DNA repair mechanisms work better than at higher doses. This nonlinear DNA damage response casts … read more »

For an older woman, there’s a good chance that any breast cancer detected by mammography will be a low-risk type, according to a new study by researchers at The University of California, San Francisco, and the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam.

The researchers also found that the advent of mammography seems to have led to an increase in the detection of … read more »

Medicare imaging is down, and the American College of Radiology is creating a list of imaging procedures that should be done less often.

Happy new year.

At a meeting last Friday, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) confirmed that Medicare imaging decreased 2.5 percent in 2010. MedPAC views that as a good thing; a slide presentation says the “decrease in use of … read more »

Routine MRI scans provide no benefit when given prior to epidural steroid injections, the most common procedure performed at U.S. pain clinics, according to a new study led by Johns Hopkins researchers.

The study, published online this week in Archives of Internal Medicine (and freely available), examined treatment for sciatica at several U.S. pain clinics. Most common is an epidural steroid … read more »

A new camera so fast that it can capture the movement of a burst of light—in slow motion—could lead to a new way of imaging.

Researchers at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have developed a video camera that can capture 1 trillion exposures per second. So it can show a single burst of light traveling in slow motion through … read more »

How hard is the federal government cracking down on Medicare and Medicaid fraud? Tuesday morning, 65 federal and local agents and officers arrested 13 doctors and a nurse practitioner in New Jersey on charges of taking illegal kickbacks from a radiology clinic.

That’s a lot of man- and womanpower—especially for people accused of nonviolent crimes and presumably not likely to be … read more »