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Daily Rounds: Drugging Poor Kids; Tainted Steroids And No Oversight; Doctors Warm To Global Budgets; Lead In The Eggs

Attention Disorder Or Not, Pills To Help in School (The New York Times) — "The pills boost focus and impulse control in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Although A.D.H.D is the diagnosis Dr. Anderson makes, he calls the disorder “made up” and “an excuse” to prescribe the pills to treat what he considers the children’s true ill — poor academic performance in inadequate schools. “I don’t have a whole lot of choice,” said Dr. Anderson, a pediatrician for many poor families in Cherokee County, north of Atlanta. “We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid.” Dr. Anderson is one of the more outspoken proponents of an idea that is gaining interest among some physicians. They are prescribing stimulants to struggling students in schools starved of extra money — not to treat A.D.H.D., necessarily, but to boost their academic performance."

Outbreak Spurs Calls For More Control (The Wall Street Journal) — "But health officials and lawmakers say these facilities essentially slide through the cracks because no one entity has full responsibility for overseeing them. "Compounding pharmacies currently fall into a regulatory black hole," Rep. Ed Markey (D., Mass.) wrote in a letter to Margaret Hamburg, Food and Drug Administration commissioner, on Monday. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.), called for the FDA's oversight authority of the facilities to be extended if necessary, saying that compounding pharmacies' "relative immunity from standards of safety and effectiveness seems anomalous and unacceptable." Mr. Blumenthal is on the Senate committee that oversees how much jurisdiction the FDA has. If the FDA had full oversight of these pharmacies, it could treat their compounds as new drugs and require the pharmacies to submit clinical trials before the drugs are allowed on the market. It also would have more powers to inspect facilities."

Doctors Warm To New Pay Models (The Boston Globe) — "Doctors in Massachusetts may be looking a bit more favorably on new payment methods created under state and federal laws, according to a survey of 1,095 practicing physicians by the Massachusetts Medical Society. About 49 percent of respondents said they are likely to participate in a voluntary global payment system, in which doctors are paid a fixed rate to manage the care of a group of patients. That’s up from 42 percent in 2011, the first year that questions about the new payment methods were included in the annual survey. Those who worked at community health centers were most open to the idea of global payments, and self-employed physicians were least likely to participate."

Worries About Lead For New York City's Garden-Fresh Chickens (The New York Times) — "To the long list of food conundrums, add this one: new research has found elevated levels of lead in eggs from chickens in New York City’s public neighborhood gardens. Preliminary results from a New York State Health Department study show that more than half of the eggs tested from chickens kept in community gardens in Brooklyn, Bronx and Queens had detectable levels of lead, unlike their store-bought counterparts. While lead is a naturally occurring element that is ingested in a variety of ways, it has been well established to be harmful to humans, even in very low quantities."

This program aired on October 9, 2012. The audio for this program is not available.

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