Every year, pharmaceutical companies contribute millions of dollars to U.S. senators and representatives as part of a multipronged effort to influence health care lawmaking and spending priorities. For example, Sen. Tim Scott, a rising star in the Republican Party with broad popularity in South Carolina, is getting showered with drug industry money before facing voters this fall.
Healthy eating is your recipe for managing diabetes.
More than 37 million Americans have diabetes (about 1 in 10), and approximately 90-95% have type 2 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes most often develops in people over age 45, but more and more children, teens, and young adults are also developing it. A study has found that people with type 2 diabetes were at higher risk of developing 57 health conditions than non-diabetics.
Oxford researchers say they have confirmed that alcohol is a direct cause of cancer, emphasizing how their findings reinforce the need to lower levels of alcohol consumption in the population for cancer prevention. The question is will the healthcare community do anything about these findings?
Mental illnesses are common in the United States. Nearly one in five U.S. adults live with a mental illness (52.9 million in 2020). Mental illnesses include many different conditions that vary in severity, ranging from mild to moderate to severe. Suicidal ideation continues to increase among adults in the U.S. 4.58% of adults report having serious thoughts of suicide, an increase of 664,000 people from last year’s dataset. The national rate of suicidal ideation among adults has increased every year since 2011-2012.
I’ve seen some new energy and thinking taking root in some big pharma companies. Still, I’m also seeing some recycled executives show up at other companies when they should have been removed permanently from the industry.
Accelerated Approval allows for early access to drugs and biologics based on initial evidence of safety and effectiveness, while confirmatory studies required to verify clinical benefits are ongoing. Do patients care? No.
The promise of one-stop, total healthcare was supposed to be led by retailers like Wal*Mart and CVS, but they’re finding out it costs a lot of money to equip and market these facilities. Patients still want convenience in their healthcare, but it may take decades to materialize.
An increasing number of headlines amplifying many incomplete data around telehealth have led industry stakeholders to extrapolate discrete data points about telehealth to the entire U.S. population. Using an economic framework to analyze national telehealth data. Only 25.6% of Americans utilized telehealth during the two years of the pandemic. Said another way, investments in the telehealth market have been made on the thesis that telehealth is preferred among most Americans. But the reality is that all these efforts are being dedicated to only a subset of the U.S. population. (Source: Trilliant Health Feb 2022)