The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
In their new book, "The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills," economist David Stuckler and physician Sanjay Basu examine the health impacts of austerity across the globe. The authors estimate there have been more than 10,000 additional suicides and up to a million extra cases of depression across Europe and the United States since governments started introducing austerity programs in the aftermath of the economic crisis. For example in Greece, where spending on public health has been...
Irin Carmon -
Angelina Jolie's op-ed about her approach to mitigating breast cancer risk helped a company's stock value rise 4%. Is that what medicine is really about?
Times today has focused on her decision to undergo a double mastectomy after learning she carried the BRCA1 gene. As Salon noted here, that’s not the only option. But for those who do want to consider following Jolie’s path, there are structural barriers to even gaining the information to make those choices, something she...
Humans invented the idea of hospitals in the 1780's, and it is time to update our thinking, argues Eric Dishman. "We have got to untether clinicians and patients from the notion of traveling to a special bricks and mortar place for all of our care, because these places are often the wrong tool and the most expensive tool for the job. And, these are sometimes unsafe places to send our sickest patients, especially in an era of super bugs and hospital acquired infections," he contends....
Peer reviewed literature in the medical field is misleading cautions Ben Goldacre, a doctor, who argues that when it comes to drug tests, "positive findings are around twice as likely to be published as negative findings. This is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine." In other words, when a new drug gets tested, all the results of the trials should be published for the rest of the medical world to see - except much of the time, negative or inconclusive findings go...
Glenn Ashton -
There are two kinds of South Africans. Some, who will read this article - the consumers of printed and online media - and the rest, who most likely will not. The first kind are more likely to be able to access health care on demand. The second probably cannot. How can we get these two worlds to meet?
The National Health Insurance (NHI) programme is a state initiative to improve the constitutional prerogative of egalitarian, universal health care. Although a degree of healthcare is broadly...
This is a TED talk that every doctor in the world should watch.
Rebecca Onie asks audacious questions: What if waiting rooms were a place to improve daily health care? What if doctors could prescribe food, housing and heat in the winter? At TEDMED she describes Health Leads, an American organization that does just that -- and does it by building a volunteer base as elite and dedicated as a college sports team.
Onie is the founder of Health Leads, a program that connects patients to...
