Today is World Asthma Day, an effort to raise awareness about asthma and improve asthma care for patients. Asthma is a chronic disease that affects people all over the world. It imposes a growing burden on society, with prevalence on the rise and an annual economic cost of $19.7 billion. We talked with Dave Allen, [...]
For those of you that claim Virginia as home, like I do, I have bad news. For the second year in a row, Richmond, VA, has been named the “Asthma Capital” in the research and ranking by the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America (AAFA). Although there is no place free from asthma triggers, some cities are [...]
Wow! That was what I said when I read the Reuters article about America’s growing waistlines. It is truly troubling that incidents of extreme or “morbid” obesity has risen sixfold in the U.S. since 1960 and that medical spending due to obesity is now exceeding costs associated with smoking. In fact, the burden of obesity [...]
In a recent op-ed in The Boston Globe, Merck’s Chief Medical Officer Mike Rosenblatt and Dr. Harris Berman, Dean of Tufts Medical School, commented on the pressing need to fix a fundamental problem in healthcare today: getting patients to take their medications. Rosenblatt and Berman comment in the op-ed: “It is sobering to know that [...]
