Posts Tagged: treatment
Opinion
OPINION: The California legislature is considering legislative action that would streamline the approval process for people accessing care through Medi-Cal to receive their prescribed medications for serious mental illness without undue delays As a physician who has served our community for more than 25 years, I strongly support this effort.
News
The “bubble babies” saga and a California-financed cure for their life-threatening affliction has hit another snag, more than two years after a British company abandoned the effort. It is a story that involves more than $40 million from California’s stem cell agency, federal regulators, the University of California, the agonizingly slow pace of science and 20 children who have been denied care — not to mention a company called Orchard Therapeutics PLC.
Opinion
OPINION: The man experiencing homelessness was nodding off when a street medicine provider from Venice Family Clinic recognized the signs of an opioid overdose. The provider gave the man a dose of naloxone (Narcan®) and prevented another potential overdose death on the streets of Los Angeles.
News
A London-based biotech firm has given up its life-saving treatment for the bubble baby disease and turned it over to California’s $12 billion stem cell agency and UCLA, where it was developed with tens of millions of taxpayer dollars.
Opinion
OPINION: Step therapy forces patients to try insurer-preferred medications before approving the medication initially prescribed by the doctor. Utilized by both public and private insurers, step therapy undermines the clinical judgment of doctors and puts patients’ health at risk.
Opinion
OPINION: Orthodontists in practice throughout California embrace new technologies as a way to improve service delivery and access to care, but we want to caution policymakers and consumers that its utilization should not come at the expense of patient health and safety.
News
Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Stephen Manley refers to defendants in his courtroom as “clients” – an indication of the unusually informal and conversational tenor of the Behavioral Health Court he created more than two decades ago. “It tends to break through a barrier,” Manley said.
Opinion
OPINION: It’s never a good idea when insurers cut costs by interfering in the decision-making process between patients and their doctor. But during a national pandemic, it’s a particularly bad idea. I am thinking specifically of an insurance strategy called step therapy.
News
Police response to mental-health calls often ends – again and again – in chaotic, noisy hospital emergency rooms, where staff is stretched thin, and a heart attack is likely to take precedence over someone in the throes of a mental-health crisis. “Traditionally, people would be dropped off at the ER, and the only option was to transfer them to a psychiatric facility,” says Dr. Scott Zeller, a nationally known emergency psychiatrist and former president of the American Association for Emergency Psychiatry.
Opinion
OPINION: In the many years we have been treating patients, the hardest conversations to get through were always revealing a person’s cancer diagnosis to them for the first time. But like everything else in our world today—that has changed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A photo illustration of a young woman in mental anguish. (Image: Photographee.eu, via Shutterstock)
