Orshe

A nationwide push is underway to lower radiation exposure from CT scans, amid growing concern about the risks of cancer linked to the high-powered imaging technology, as I write in the Informed Patient column today.

Last we heard of Fablyn, an experimental bone drug for the treatment of postmenopausal women, U.S. regulators were holding off on approval after FDA staff and outside reviewers raised concerns and Pfizer, the pill’s maker, was shopping it around to other companies.

The magnet in “magnetic resistance imaging” is no joke: A patient on a metal gurney got sucked into an MRI with so much force her leg and foot were fractured.

Starting this year, some high-profile Boston hospitals put new rules in place that prohibited their docs from being paid by drug companies to give speeches. One doc recently left one of the hospitals — and a job as an instructor at Harvard med school — in order to keep getting paid by the industry, the Boston Globe reports.

Sure, you know all about gray matter. But its lesser known counterpart white matter — the stuff that coordinates communication between regions of the brain — is coming on strong. The latest example is this paper published today in the journal Neuron.

Rising health-care costs are a problem that can never be solved outright; they can only be managed in an eternal, iterative way. So including a bunch of little pilot projects in the Senate health-care bill — rather than a few big, sweeping measures — is a step in the right direction, Atul Gawande argues in this week’s New Yorker.

Two years from today, if everything goes according to plan, Lipitor will go generic. That’s likely to be the end of an era when big drug makers built their businesses around mega-blockbuster drugs that treat common, chronic conditions.

In its magazine section this weekend, the Financial Times traced the long arc of the cholesterol drug, which has earned more than $80 billion for Pfizer.

Cardiologist Gregory Thomas was visiting Cairo’s Egyptian Museum in 2008 when he happened to notice a nameplate for the mummy of Pharaoh Merenptah. It said the ruler of Egypt some 3,200 years ago had atherosclerosis, arthritis and dental decay when he died.

“I didn’t believe it,” says Thomas, who is also an imaging specialist at University of California, Irvine. “I wanted to know whether it was accurate and if it was, how often did people have it.”

It looks like the FDA could ban drinks that combine alcohol and caffeine. If that happens, it’ll be the continuation of a couple trends: The agency’s recent scrutiny of food companies, and a push by some activists and state officials against alcoholic energy drinks.

The flu had been rampaging through our kids’ school for weeks –- some days, their classes were less than half-full -– and we hadn’t been able to find any pediatricians or pharmacies with the H1N1 vaccine in our suburban Denver community.

So when the county announced a free H1N1 clinic for students, I figured we should take advantage. The first clinic was this past Saturday, at a local high school.