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More drugs, less couch
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Cartoons about the psychiatrist's couch were recently the subject of a museum exhibition. Now, the couch itself may be headed for a museum.
A new study finds a significant decline in psychotherapy practiced by U.S. psychiatrists.
The expanded use of pills and insurance policies that favor short office visits are among the reasons, said lead author Dr. Ramin Mojtabai of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.
"The 'couch,' or, more generally, long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy, was for so long a hallmark of the practice of psychiatry. It no longer is," he said.
Today's psychiatrists get reimbursed by insurance companies at a lower rate for a 45-minute psychotherapy visit than for three 15-minute medication visits, he explained.
LENSES FOR LAZY EYE
A small number of U.S. children are trying an experimental surgery to prevent virtual blindness from lazy eye diagnosed too late, or too severe, for standard treatment.
Up to 5 percent of children have amblyopia, commonly called lazy eye, where one eye is so much stronger than the other that the brain learns to ignore the weaker eye. Untreated, the proper neural connections for vision don't form, eventually rendering that eye useless.
Catch it early and it can be fixed by patching over the strong eye, or using special drops in it, so the brain is forced to use the weak eye. But the older the child is, the less effective the treatment -- and by age 9, brain-eye connections are pretty well set.
The new approach: Implantable lenses, the same kind that nearsighted adults can have inserted for crisper vision -- but that aren't officially approved for use in children.
PROSTATE SCREENING
The blood test millions of men undergo each year to screen for prostate cancer leads to so much unnecessary anxiety, surgery and complications that doctors should stop testing elderly men, and it remains unclear whether the test is worthwhile for younger men, a federal task force concluded Monday.
In the first update of its recommendations for prostate cancer screening in five years, the widely respected panel that sets government policy on preventive medicine said that the evidence that the test reduces the cancer's death toll is too uncertain to endorse routine use for men at any age, and the potential harms clearly outweigh any benefits for men age 75 and older.
IMMIGRANT KIDS' EXERCISE
Many immigrant children get even less vigorous exercise than their U.S.-born counterparts, a study of nearly 70,000 children suggests. Almost 18 percent of foreign-born children with immigrant parents got no vigorous exercise on any days of the week, and 56 percent didn't participate in organized sports.
By contrast, 11 percent of U.S.-born children with American parents got no vigorous exercise, and 41 percent didn't participate in sports.
The authors said it is important to know whether there are ethnic differences in physical activity and sedentary behaviors. They were led by Dr. Gopal Singh, a researcher at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services's Maternal and Child Health Bureau.
How the researchers explain their results: Immigrant families surveyed were on the whole poorer than nonimmigrants and lived in less safe neighborhoods. That means they likely had less time for exercise and sports, and worse access to places to engage in those activities.
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