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...overall increase in worldwide demand for goods. Exports from Germany, Europe's biggest economy, rose 10% last year, to a record $941 billion, and its trade surplus increased 20%, to $200.3 billion, according to Germany's Federal Statistical Office. Blanqué--who last year asked the world to "be patient with Europe"--says he sees signs that the Continent has finally "caught the train." He describes Germany's export performance as "remarkable" and says he expects the 12 European nations that have adopted the euro to experience growth of about 1.7% this year, about the same...
Even with the best alternative techniques, most patients with chronic pain will need some medication. Many general practitioners tend to use common analgesics as a one-size-fits-all remedy--a practice that contributed to the COX-2 fiasco--but pain experts try to carefully match the drug to the type of pain, the patient's risk profile and even his or her personality. "A patient's psychological preference for treating pain can be more important than the amount of medication," Palmer says. She cites the case of an elderly woman with arthritis in her back who preferred taking...
Fishman, who is president of the American Academy of Pain Medicine, laments the way insurance plans favor quick pharmaceutical fixes over the kinds of physical and psychological therapies that chronic-pain patients need. The bias toward drug treatment is not only bad medicine but is also expensive. "When somebody comes in with 25 years of chronic pain," says Fishman, "I might sit with them for 90 minutes to get the beginning of the story, to really understand what's happening. The insurers would rather pay me $1,000 to do a 20-minute injection than pay me a fraction...
Inevitably, many patients who find their way to pain-management centers wind up paying out of pocket for some of the nontraditional parts of their treatment. Still, demand for these services is soaring. Six years ago, the center at U.C. Davis received 50 to 60 patient referrals a month; now it receives 500. With fewer than 200 multidisciplinary centers across the U.S., the need simply cannot be met. "The bottom line is that there will never be enough specialists to deal with the problem," says Fishman. "So we have to train primary-care physicians at the front lines...
Where did this strain come from? Because the virus is not like the strains that have been circulating in New York, scientists are tracking down the patient's recent partners, and believe that they have so far found two people, also from the New York area, who may be infected. A California testing lab that conducted a preliminary genetic analysis of its database may have identified an additional case among its samples...