The Health News USA August 28 2017
Overview
- Intermountain Healthcare, a Utah-based hospital chain pledged to slash the number of opioid pills prescribed for patients with acute pain at its facilities by 40 percent by the end of 2018. Intermountain said it believed it is the first American health system “to formally announce such a significant and specific amount of reduction as a target.”
- Officials announced Cal State Los Angeles was awarded $16.6 million to bring dental care to underserved communities in the Greater Los Angeles area. The grant has been billed as the largest in the university’s history.
- California state regulators have been asked to investigate ‘deceptive’ claims made by Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop lifestyle company that there are health benefits to dozens of products promoted on its website, including the assertion that jade vagina eggs can improve sexual energy, restore hormonal balance and prevent uterine prolapse.
News on Health Professional Radio. Today is the 28th of August 2017. Read by Tabetha Moreto. Health New
A Utah-based hospital chain pledged Wednesday to slash the number of opioid pills prescribed for patients with acute pain at its facilities by forty percent by the end of two thousand eighteen. Intermountain Healthcare’s pledge comes in the face of a worsening epidemic of painkiller and heroin abuse in the United States. In two thousand fifteen, there were more than thirty three thousand fatalities from opioid overdoses recorded — almost half of which involved prescription painkillers. If Intermountain achieves its goal, it will reduce the number of opioid tablets it prescribes to patients with acute pain in Utah and southern Idaho by more than five million each year at its twenty two hospitals and one hundred eighty clinics. Intermountain said it believed it is the first American health system “to formally announce such a significant and specific amount of reduction as a target.”
….
Doctor Doug Smith, Intermountain’s associate medical director, noted that nationally there is a problem with health providers tending “to write prescriptions for more opioids than patients need, and large quantities of medications are often left over after the need for pain relief is past.
That opens the door for patients abusing their own medication, or the pills being abused by relatives or friends of a patient. Intermountain also already has trained about two thousand five hundred of its caregivers as part of the opioid reduction initiative.Utah, where most of Intermountain’s facilities are located, has been particularly hard hit by the opioid crisis, with the state being ranked anywhere from seventh to twelfth in the nation for overdoses. Intermountain, which has eight hundred fifty thousand members in the health insurance plan it operates, each year has some kind of interaction with one point two million people in Utah, which has a population of just three million.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-cal-state-grant-20170823-story.html
California State Los Angeles was awarded sixteen point six million dollars to bring dental care to underserved communities in the Greater Los Angeles area, officials said Tuesday, billing the grant as the largest in the university’s history. The school was one of fifteen agencies awarded funding from the California Department of Health Care Services to create programs to improve access to dental care over the next four years for the roughly five million children enrolled in the Denti-Cal program. The state will dole out a total of one hundred fifty million dollars for the projects, which are part of the Medi-Cal two thousand twenty Dental Transformation Initiative.
With the grant, the university, in partnership with the USC School of Dentistry, will send out mobile care teams to offer dental screenings and connect children with dentists. Over the next four years, officials expect to work with about thirty two thousand youth under the age of twenty in urban communities around USC, Cal State L.A. and in the San Gabriel Valley. As part of the program, students will be trained in identifying and responding to challenges families face that prevent young people from accessing dental care.
California state regulators have been asked to investigate ‘deceptive’ claims made by Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop lifestyle company that there are health benefits to dozens of products promoted on its website, including the assertion that jade vagina eggs can improve sexual energy, restore hormonal balance and prevent uterine prolapse. On Tuesday, the nonprofit Truth in Advertising called on district attorneys’ offices in Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties, which are members of the California Food Drug and Medical Device Task Force, to investigate how the Los Angeles-based Goop promotes these products and to take appropriate action.
In all, Truth in Advertising said it had catalogued more than fifty instances of Paltrow’s startup boasting that its products — along with outside products it promotes on its site — can treat, cure, prevent, alleviate, or reduce the risk of ailments such as infertility, depression, psoriasis, anxiety, and even cancer. In addition to the vagina eggs, these products include black rose bar for psoriasis, wearable stickers for anxiety, and vitamin D three for cancer. “The problem is that the company does not possess the competent and reliable scientific evidence required by law to make such claims,” the Connecticut-based advocacy group wrote in a blog post. Goop has long faced criticism for not being able to back up its claims, including from Doctor Jennifer Gunter, a San Francisco gynecologist and medical blogger, who has consistently denounced a number of Goop-endorsed products, including the jade vagina eggs.
Goop began in two thousand eight as a “homespun weekly newsletter,” sharing Paltrow’s whimsical thoughts on everything from travel and cooking to health, fitness, and the psyche. Goop has since grown into a wellness empire that markets a overabundance of alternative health and other specialty items aimed at a variety of physical and mental health issues, Truth in Advertising said. After reportedly raising fifteen to twenty million dollars in venture capital in two thousand sixteen, Goop entered the thirty seven billion dollar supplement industry in March when it launched Goop Wellness, a line of supplements that sold more than one hundred thousand dollars worth of product the day it debuted.
0 Comments