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When I go to the doctor for a strange new symptom, my anxiety shoots through the roof. I’m flooded with relief whenever a doctor tells me that what I'm experiencing is "normal." |
The problem is, when patients hear that type of reassurance, they may take it to mean they don’t need any treatment—the upshot of a new study published this week. |
Doctors should try phrasing this good news differently, the researchers told my colleague Jeffrey Kluger in his new piece for TIME. “Every word that doctors use has meaning, it has weight,” one of them said. They identified a reassuring script that seems to work better. |
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TODAY’S TOPICS |
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QUICK CHAT |
Essential drugs are disappearing |
In recent years, some people diagnosed with cancer have been met with the startling news that the chemotherapy regimen doctors would most like to use isn’t available. A number of essential drugs, including chemo drugs carboplatin and cisplatin, have seen frequent shortages. |
For my recent TIME story on the subject, I spoke to Stefan Scholtes, professor of health management at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., about why this keeps happening. —Veronique Greenwood, Staff Writer, Health & Science |
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. |
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Sergii Kolesnikov—Getty Images |
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How do essential drugs wind up being in short supply? |
In hospital purchasing in the U.S. and elsewhere, we've created procurement systems that ensure that we drive the price down. In the U.S. these are group purchasing organizations (GPOs). They negotiate prices with manufacturers, and they try to drive a price as low as possible. For a generic drug, like these chemotherapies, that’s very low. |
How does negotiating a low price make drugs harder to manufacture? |
For manufacturers, that creates a problem. They do agree to a price, but the hospitals and GPOs do not commit to buying an agreed volume. Therefore, the economics does not translate into a revenue line for the manufacturing. |
You get this race-to-the-bottom dynamic, where your manufacturing process is relying on the least possible cost. This leads to manufacturers dropping out. |
A few years ago, you wrote a paper about a possible solution to the problem, something you called a health care utility. |
Yes. The hospitals behind this came in and said, "We've tried a lot of things. Why don't we create our own manufacturer and pool our demand, and then we have the volume that we need?” |
This new company, called Civica, set up in 2018 as a not-for-profit company. I believe it's the first not-for-profit drug manufacturer in the U.S. It's an interesting concept. |
They only focus on drugs that are in shortage. So this is never going to be a big manufacturer, because they are really laser-focused on that problem. But what's interesting in the whole concept is Civica is not after market share. It just wants to signal to the market what a sensible manufacturer could charge, and so it helps these other manufacturers to avoid the race to the bottom. |
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TODAY I LEARNED |
Some telehealth sites are operating as ‘pill mills’ |
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Photo-Illustration by TIME (Source Image: irynakhabliuk via Canva) |
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The Senate recently published the results of its nine-month investigation into telehealth sites, some of which dole out medications to just about any patient who asks for them. One of the sites in the report gave a prescription to every single patient who had a virtual visit. |
Telehealth has boomed since the pandemic, and the sites are proliferating without much medical oversight, as I wrote about yesterday in my new feature for TIME. —Alana Semuels, Senior Correspondent |
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PLEASE ADVISE |
Ask the health team |
Have a burning health or wellness question? Wondering how to handle a tricky social situation? Please write to healthmatters@time.com, and we’ll weigh in weekly in the newsletter. |
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WHAT WE’RE READING |
Eli Lilly is suing six companies it says illegally sold black-market versions of its experimental weight-loss drug, retatrutide, Robin Respaut reports for Reuters. Can weird tricks make running more enjoyable? Ioan Marc Jones at the Guardian explores how everything from pickle juice to zombie apps can help reluctant runners learn to love it. Asking people to pay for medical care upfront—even when they have insurance—is becoming more common, Julie Appleby writes for KFF Health News.
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