Inside Medicine Week In Review (January 14, 2023).
Inside Medicine Week In Review (January 14, 2023).
Quick catch up, solid reading recs, and my appreciation to you!
Welcome back to the Inside Medicine “Week In Review” feature. This is meant to be a convenient way to find what we've covered this week (in case you missed anything or never got around to reading something you’d flagged) and a chance for me to share some good stuff from other writers and outlets (“What I’m Reading”).
This week in Inside Medicine:
Monday: Data Snapshot: Covid-19, flu, and RSV hospitalizations on a single graph.
Tuesday: At last, my immediate family is now fully vaccinated against Covid-19.
Wednesday: Fun with OpenAI, medical charting, and diagnostics. (Also: I just got lied to by a bot).
Friday: The two sides of the bivalent booster debate, broken down and explained.
What I’m Reading (items written elsewhere that I found important and interesting (note: some may be paywalled or require free registration):
“The Dire Aftermath of China’s Untenable “Zero COVID” Policy.” (Dhruv Khullar, The New Yorker).
“A preventive treatment for Long COVID?" (Ben Mazer, Substack). Note: I think there’s a larger and potentially optimistic story on metformin that may become interesting. Stay tuned.
“Three years on, the pandemic — and our response — have been jolting. Here’s what even the experts didn’t see coming.” (Helen Branswell, STAT News).
“The X Waiver Is Officially Dead—But now, doctors will have to take substance use disorder training to get their DEA license.” (Amanda D'Ambrosio, MedPage Today).
Tweet of the week (Yes, I’m still on Twitter, so you don’t have to be):
Looks like artificial intelligence can indeed pass the medical boards now. But as we saw with my experience with OpenAI this last week, computers are not quite ready to make me obsolete!
Thanks for liking and sharing the newsletter every day! That helps the content here gain further reach. And, as always, a special thanks to the upgraded subscribers who make such great comments. Increasingly, that’s the pulse of this newsletter, and I hope to see the community continue to grow so that the conversations can be even more robust.
Also, let me know if you have topics you’d like me to cover.
Have a great Saturday!
Oops, typed this as I was falling asleep - 1:2100 rate was hospitalizations, not death, and over 65 population... nonetheless 565 US deaths per day does translate into A LOT of unreported Covid spreading freely right now. If NYT reporting 40k people hospitalized, and most are probably 65+, and the rate is somewhere around 1:2100 - that still a staggering number of covid cases. Tens of millions, right?
Anyway my math speculations aren’t that solid, but looking at NYT reporting 60k daily infections and 40k current hospitalizations... they should just stop with the daily cases already and pick a better metric. Sewage. But who wants to read that 🤢
Thanks for introducing me to Ben Mazer, I’ve read his articles in The Atlantic. Curious about metformin, too. I’m thinking this won’t hold up as well in non-obese?
Educating and persuading the average patient to take this will be a challenge