Word: treatments
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...Nevertheless, a literature of migraines has formed over the centuries. The founding father of migraine theory is a Victorian physician named Edward Liveing, who called them "nerve-storms," but references to them can be pried out of Sumerian documents 5,000 years old. The history of their treatment is about as bizarre and useless a medical menagerie as you could wish for. (Two words: beaver testes.) It's only in the past 40 years that they've have become a serious topic for mainstream medicine...
Levy takes us through his own treatment and the wreckage his migraines create around them - the abandoned dinner parties, the bad parenting, the lousy job performance. He encourages us to generalize from his example to take in the true dimensions of what is still a largely silent epidemic: 1 in 10 Americans suffers from migraines, and only around half of them have received a diagnosis...
...medicine cabinet is familiar with the warnings against using nearly every kind of medication, including those sold over the counter, from the moment of conception onward. Yet each year in the U.S., some 500,000 pregnant women battle psychiatric illness, cancer, autoimmune disease, influenza and other conditions that require treatment. Leaving aside for a moment the issue of whether the benefits of certain drugs outweigh the risks to the baby, what is the appropriate dosage for a mom-to-be? Given the shifts in her metabolism, how much she should take is often anyone's guess...
...drug use by pregnant women. Prompted by a spate of birth defects caused by thalidomide, the notorious morning-sickness drug, the agency since 1979 has classified drugs in one of five pregnancy-related categories, with A being the safest and X being the least necessary (like Accutane, an acne treatment associated with birth defects). Category B has pretty positive safety data, and D encompasses chemotherapy and other drugs whose benefits may outweigh the risks to the fetus. And then there's Category C, which covers the mushy middle. Karen Feibus, who oversees the FDA's maternal-health team...
...bring down costs? The problem with American health care, those who have studied the system will tell you, is not that we get too little care but that we use too much. By some estimates, as much as 30 cents of every health-care dollar is spent on medical treatment that is unnecessary, ineffective, duplicative or even harmful. Changing all that is going to require revamping health care from top to bottom, starting with the way health-care providers are reimbursed. While the current system pays them for the amount of care they provide, real reform would put more emphasis...