FDA approved OTC nalaxone today for use in treating overdoses. Good move, as families could obtain scripts in the past on behalf of patients in the past — and, contrary to popular belief, does not itself lead to acute opioid intoxication.

Just over 5% of US physicians is African-American. This startling statistic has, once again, led to the consideration of inhibiting factors that may occur decades earlier within the formal sphere of socialization, education, and resource accessibility of Black students.

One reason why the percentage of US doctors who are Black remains far below that of the US population that is Black can be traced to how Black people have been “historically excluded from medicine” and the “institutional and systemic racism in our society,” said Michael Dill, the Association of American Medical Colleges’ director of workforce studies. […]

“And it occurs over the course of what I think of as the trajectory to becoming a physician,” Dill said. At young ages, exposure to the sciences, science education resources, mentors and role models all make it more likely that a child could become a doctor – but such exposures and resources sometimes are disproportionately not as accessible in the Black community.

This doesn’t even take into account the raw number of Black females represented in medicine - a demographic which has also had to contend with sexism within the ranks of hierarchical ascension within medicine.

In 1940, only 2.8% of physicians were Black, but 9.7% of the US population was Black; by 2018, 5.4% of physicians were Black, but 12.8% of the population was Black.

“The more surprising thing to me was for Black men,” said Dr. Dan Ly, an author of the study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine and assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Data on only Black men who were physicians over the years showed that they represented 1.3% of the physician workforce in 1900, “because all physicians were pretty much men in the past,” Ly said. Black men represented 2.7% of the physician workforce in 1940 and 2.6% in 2018.

I seriously don’t know why the problem of mounting issues with acute (hospital) care discharge is just now being reported on — as if this was never on healthcare policymakers’ radar?

Waiting patients also increase caseloads for nurses, which increases their stress and reduces the time they can spend with others. Patients and family members grow anxious as they wait for days or weeks, which can spark verbal or even physical altercations.

Probably because we now have a legislature that is under DFL control. Good luck with this one…

Why is this happening?

The number of babies in Mississippi being treated for congenital syphilis has jumped by more than 900% over five years, uprooting the progress the nation’s poorest state had made in nearly quashing what experts say is an avoidable public health crisis. The rise in cases has placed newborns at further risk of life-threatening harm in a state that’s already home to the nation’s worst infant mortality rate.

In 2021, 102 newborns in Mississippi were treated for the sexually transmitted disease, up from 10 in 2016, according to an analysis of hospital billing data shared by Dr. Thomas Dobbs, the medical director for the Mississippi State Department of Health’s Crossroads Clinic in Jackson, which focuses on sexually transmitted infections.

HHS report: 6% of the more than 130M adults in the US receive the wrong diagnosis in emergency departments each year.

New Zealand was one of the initial nations to embrace complete lockdowns, now it’s one of the last to completely lift them.

WH: Americans will likely need a yearly booster to protect against COVID.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, says he expects this fall to be the beginning of annual shots for Covid-19, though he added that those who are immunocompromised might need more frequent protection.

“In the absence of a dramatically different variant, we likely are moving towards a path with a vaccination cadence similar to that of the annual influenza vaccine, with annual updated Covid-19 shots matched to the currently circulating strains for most of the population,” Fauci said.

Monkeypox is now a global health emergency.

CDC: Over 80M wasted COVID-19 vaccination doses so far.

Gear up for an interesting travel season.

Hillary Cliniton tests positive for COVID.

The solution to the looming physician crisis?