Category: Health

For one family, this year?s Rose Bowl festivities will be a thrill far beyond what happens on the field between the Wisconsin Badgers and the Oregon Ducks.

A new survey of surgeons suggests many fail to discuss their patients? wishes in case a risky operation goes awry, and even more would not operate if patients limited what could be done to keep them alive.

Physicians Plus is suing UW-Madison?s doctor group, saying the doctors? threat to stop treating the insurance company?s patients is illegal. Physicians Plus, owned by Meriter Health Services, says the doctor group, UW Medical Foundation, demanded fees that are too high. After Physicians Plus refused to pay the fees, it says the doctor group threatened to stop serving most of the insurance company?s patients starting in 2013. The doctor group says it?s still negotiating.

The University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics in both Madison and Janesville received the Consumer Choice Award.

Physicians Plus is threatening to sue UW-Madison?s doctor group, saying the group might cut off members? access to UW doctors because the insurance company rejected a contract it deemed too expensive. The threat of legal action, made in a Physicians Plus news release Monday, comes less than three weeks after UW?s doctor group sued Meriter Health Services, which owns Physicians Plus. The lawsuit claims Meriter Hospital wouldn?t provide night coverage for UW?s family medicine patients or allow more UW doctors to provide the coverage. The new conflict, according to Physicians Plus, involves an “ultimatum” from the doctor group, UW Medical Foundation.

Dear Editor: I echo your call for elected officials? positions on ?personhood? (?Where do state leaders stand on ?personhood???). After solid defeats in Colorado and Mississippi, this absurd notion has come to Wisconsin, courtesy of state Rep. Andre Jacque, R-Bellevue. I have treated the women of Wisconsin for 18 years. I must know: Does our government want to rob my patients of basic medicine, just to give legal rights to fertilized eggs?

Avoiding antibiotics when they aren?t needed. Disinfecting rooms with ultraviolet light. Installing sensors to make sure workers wash their hands. Hospitals in Madison and around the country are taking action against a superbug that appears to be on the rise.The bacterium is called Clostridium difficile, or C.diff. It may not be as well known as MRSA, a drug-resistant staph infection, but it has become more of a threat.

An emaciated 4-year-old Thoroughbred named Sarahs Tiger needed a sling hung from a special scaffold to keep him upright when he was brought by equine ambulance to the UW Veterinary Medical Hospital on Tuesday. It wasn?t long ago when Tiger was a handsome gelding 16 hands high and presumably with a future as a race horse. But after he failed to win on the track, he was left to starve on an Illinois farm before rescuers stepped in late last month and tried to save him.

Dr. Sarah Jacob said Tiger?s condition was guarded to poor. ?The next 24 to 48 hours will tell the story of how he?s going to do,? she said.

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Ten years ago, working on a night shift as a resident in a Madison emergency room, Josh Medow found himself treating a child with hydrocephalus, a disease in which fluid accumulates in the brain. The child had a headache and the anxious parents feared the worst ? that a shunt designed to drain the fluid had failed and potentially lethal pressure was building up in the boy?s brain. Medow realized there was no way to check whether pressure was indeed increasing, short of intrusive and painful procedures. The child ended up in the operating room. Today, Medow, 38, an attending neurosurgeon at UW Hospital, is on the verge of patenting a device he invented that allows doctors and even parents to easily keep track of cranial pressure in a child with hydrocephalus.

The ankle braces many football players wear to prevent injuries seem to work, a study of high school players suggests.

After following more than 2,000 football players during last year?s season, researchers discovered that wearing ankle braces made players 61 percent less likely to suffer an ankle sprain or fracture.

“We were surprised with the findings,” said Timothy A. McGuine, an athletic trainer and senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who led the work. “I didn?t think the braces could be that effective.”

1qThe Oscar Rennebohm Foundation identified itself Tuesday as the group that anonymously donated $1 million to the UW-Madison School of Nursing.

Dr. Diane Heatley, an accomplished pediatric otolaryngology (ear, nose, throat) surgeon for the past 18 years at the University of Wisconsin Hospital, was recently appointed to serve as the interim medical director of the American Family Children?s Hospital.

Design plans for the University of Wisconsin-Madison?s new $52.8 million School of Nursing got the green light Friday from the UW Board of Regents, paving the way for the school to expand its undergraduate nursing enrollment by 20% to 25% in the next five years.

A community outreach program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has received a federal grant of $23.5 million over five years to help 10 Wisconsin cities tackle the root causes – such as smoking, poor diet and lack of physical activity – of some chronic diseases.

Doctors are in the cross-hairs of the nation?s politics more than ever. We?re all being asked to achieve more with less. We must cope with nightmare scenarios precipitated by cracks in the social and healthcare infrastructure so often these days that medical schools insist students become effective patient advocates as well as healers. Practicing good medicine necessitates navigating a minefield of competing interests. Doctors are increasingly tempted to just walk out, to lay down the pen, or to use their power in ways that subvert the system. As I wrote earlier this year, a group of Wisconsin doctors, all dedicated patient advocates, carried out a plan they hatched in the latter category.