April, 2019, Update: How to Challenge Health Care Corruption Under a Corrupt Regime?

In these last few weeks, the US news has been dominated by the release of a redacted verion of the Mueller report which included extensive evidence of questionable behavior by President Trump, his campaign, and various Trump associates.  This week, an editorial in Mother Jones suggested:


The Russia scandal was never, in the main, about whether the president would be prosecuted for a crime. It

The Rise of Ideologically or Theologically Based Medicine, Public Health, and Health Policy - Recent Examples

I have long been a proponent of evidence-based medicine (EBM), and evidence-based health care, public health, and health policy.  EBM, for example, is about medical-decision making based on critical review of the best applicable evidence from clinical research informed by knowledge og biology and medicine, of the patient's biopsychosocial circumstances, the patient's values, and of ethics and

The HIV Epidemic, and Now the Measles Outbreak: The Russian Connection

I am old enough to remember having measles as a child, a thoroughly unpleasant experience.  Some children had much unhappier results of measles than I did.  So as a parent, I was happy to see that a reasonably effective measles vaccine had practically eliminated the disease from the US and most developed countries.

However, we currently are in the midst of a measles outbreak in the US.  The

First the NIH Came for the Iranian Born Legal US Resident Scientists

Transparency, honesty, and collaboration are necessary to do science, including biomedical and clinical science right.  In the US, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have always had a good reputation for transparency, honesty and collaboration, although they have had some revolving door and conflict of interest issues of late (look here, here, here here, and here).

However, an April 3

Why Did the Head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services Outsource Communications Functions to Private Public Relations Firms? - Ethical and Legal Questions

There is now never a dull moment at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) an agency of the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).  Its current director, Seema Verma, has developed a more efficient way to combine conflicts of interest with self-interest, bad management, and possibly worse.

Outsourcing CMS Communications to Private Public Relations Firms


In summary,