By Hal Brown
The website STAT describes itself as follows:
STAT delivers fast, deep, and tough-minded journalism about health, medicine, life sciences and the fast-moving business of making medicines. We take you inside academic labs, biotech boardrooms, and political backrooms. We cast a critical eye on scientific discoveries, scrutinize corporate strategies, and chronicle roiling battles for talent, money, and market share. We examine controversies and puncture hype. With an award-winning newsroom, STAT gives you indispensable insights and exclusive stories on the technologies, personalities, power brokers, and political forces driving massive changes in the life science industry — and a revolution in human health. These are the stories that matter to us all.
What’s STAT all about?
STAT is a media company focused on finding and telling compelling stories about health, medicine, and scientific discovery. We produce daily news, investigative articles, and narrative projects in addition to multimedia features. We tell our stories from the places that matter to our readers — research labs, hospitals, executive suites, and political campaigns.
Why did you call it STAT?
In medical parlance, “stat” means important and urgent, and that’s what we’re all about — quickly and smartly delivering good stories. Read more about the origins of our name here. (More here)
While there are numerous articles about pure life science and medicine there are also political stories. I find the stories about how politics and medicine intersect interesting, but it is the opinion stories that interest me the most. These were published yesterday and today.
For example, the headline story on STAT today reports on something I hadn’t considered before. It is one aspect, perhaps a small but a telling one, about police in America: Replace the ‘cold steel’ of hospital-bed shackles with the warmth of compassion.
Written by Jessica Nutik Zitter, a pulmonary/critical care and palliative physician at Highland Hospital in Oakland, Calif. it describes her experience with patients in police custody who were cuffed to their beds even as they were dying. This included a man on a ventilator who was actively dying of Covid and a patient in his seventies who was weak and wasted from his illness and being held for unpaid parking tickets. This isn’t the same as the police racism at the fore of our current debate where black lives are expendable. It is part and parcel of how dehumanizing law enforcement is and is an element of what needs to be reformed.
This story is about something I’d been aware of having known a physician who worked not as a researcher but as a marketing presentative for a pharmaceutical company. I also had a doctor who had a sign on his door saying that he wouldn’t speak to anyone representing pharmaceutical companies and assuring patients that their time with him would never be shortened by his meeting with drug company representative. This article addresses a concern every patient should have: Drug companies’ payments and gifts affect physicians’ prescribing. It’s time to turn off the spigot.
The article is by a research team at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. They “recently confirmed what drug companies have long known: Industry cash influences how doctors treat their patients. (They) analyzed all available studies that have asked the question: Do doctors prescribe more of a drug if they receive money from that drug’s manufacturer?” The answer to the question was unanimous: All 36 studies showed that receiving industry money increases prescribing.
There are no surprises in “‘There absolutely will be a black market’: How the rich and privileged can skip the line for Covid-19 vaccines” as it tells us something we already know: following the vaccine rollout, the response to the wealthy and powerful cutting the line will be different and fierce.
From prior to the election: The lesson from Trump catching Covid-19: With this virus, there are no magic bullets.
In addition to articles like these you will find thought provoking stories about things you probably haven’t considered. Here’s an example published today: ‘Already in short supply’: How climate change could chip away at sleep health.