First Opinion is STAT’s platform for fascinating, illuminating, and perhaps even provocative articles in regards to the life sciences writ giant, written by biotech insiders, well being care staff, researchers, and others.
To encourage sturdy, good-faith dialogue about points raised in First Opinion essays, STAT publishes chosen Letters to the Editor acquired in response to them. You possibly can submit a Letter to the Editor right here, or discover the submission kind on the finish of any First Opinion essay.
“Why aren’t philanthropists stepping as much as make nursing training free?” by Tracy R. Vitale and Caroline Dorsen
The scarcity of nursing school at each the affiliate diploma in nursing and the bachelor of science in nursing ranges, primarily attributable to wage buildings, has been nicely documented for no less than a pair a long time inside nursing and well being care entry advocate circles. The place it’s not recognized — no less than not with a robust and energized message — is throughout the circles of school and college improvement workplaces and neighborhood basis fundraisers. Individuals of wealth have each private {and professional} connections to nursing, whether or not as practitioners, sufferers, relations, or neighborhood leaders. The complete-bore messaging and cultivation of those donors and funders simply isn’t on the market. With out an energetic change in methods, the present pleas aren’t going to get us the place we have to go. Time to regroup!
— Allen Sensible, PhilanthropywoRx
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It’s a disgrace that extra philanthropists don’t assist nursing training. However nursing faculties are additionally responsible due partially to the conceitedness of the requirement {that a} potential nurse repeat anatomy and physiology 1 and a couple of and microbiology if it’s been greater than 5 years since he or she has taken these programs. I’ve repeated these programs as soon as and earned “A” grades in them. I used to be in my nursing clinicals when Covid-19 shut all the things down. Now I can’t afford the tutoring and I refuse to repeat these courses. There is no such thing as a such requirement for medical college. It’s the nursing college and society’s loss: I might have been an amazing nurse!
— Thomas Martin
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A significant challenge has to do with the shortage of nurse educators. I obtained my MSN-Ed with the thought of turning into a nursing college educator, however was unable to financially make this transition. Nursing college educators make considerably lower than affected person care nurses. Lack of instructors is why many who’re focused on turning into nurses are turned away.
— Kim Blanton, retired
“Useful neurological dysfunction will not be an applicable prognosis for folks with lengthy Covid,” by David Tuller, Mady Hornig, and David Putrino
I’ve struggled with a neurological incapacity for 21 years. It got here to a head following an hostile response to the Covid-19 vaccine and improvement of lengthy Covid (although I’m grateful that the vaccine protected me from earlier strains of the virus). Since that fateful day in February 2021, I’ve been rushed to an emergency division 29 instances. And whereas I’ve been proven true humane and compassionate care by professionals working in the course of the Covid pandemic, I used to be additionally repeatedly gaslit, mislabeled, and prevented from receiving the care I ought to have.
I’m not alone: An April 15, 2024, analysis letter in JAMA reported that just about 1 in 4 sufferers in additional than 29 hospitals had misdiagnoses or delays in diagnostic work-ups due to stigmatizing language of their medical data.
As a social employee who believes in social justice, I’m wondering how many individuals with lengthy Covid signs — like these with continual fatigue syndrome and Lyme illness and post-viral sickness — have been dismissed, and their signs ignored, and their care choices missed. In hope for change, I relaxation my coronary heart on the knowledge from a transferring self-reflective medical narrative by Dr. Wes Ely in his guide, “Each Deep Drawn Breath.” He wrote, “Many individuals consider drugs is grounded in benevolence, which is wishing good. It’s greater than that. The goal precept of medication should be the next normal: beneficence. Doing good.” As he shares this, it’s the covenant of all well being care professionals to follow with self-reflection, humane connection, and compassion, make diagnostic queries with curiosity and care, and keep away from labeling and phrases that hurt, pathologize and injury.
— Kate Nicoll, LCSW
“Medicare drug pricing guidelines will delay entry to promising therapies,” by Peter Rheinstein
Sure. We have already got an issue with the shortage of incentives to enhance the usage of medicine authorized a long time in the past earlier than we had the present instruments of contemporary pharmacology. We fail at personalised drugs for such medicine which may enhance each security and efficacy. Analysis prices cash and value controls will discourage extra of the real-world proof that requires higher measurement for higher dosing choices in people.
— Peter T. Kissinger, Purdue College + Inotiv + Phlebotics
“Docs ‘overprescribing’ opioids isn’t the reason for the overdose epidemic — and it by no means was,” by Richard A. “Purple” Lawhern
Casey Heely of Brandeis College has protested what she believes is “over-simplification” on my a part of the causes of the U.S. opioid disaster. In response to her concern, I might observe that main pharma corporations clearly overpromoted the protection of prescription opioids. However knowledge printed by the U.S. Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention set up past any rational contradiction that any contribution of prescriptions opioids was strictly on the margins of a a lot bigger disaster pushed by avenue medicine. Restrictions on the provision of prescription opioids have really made the disaster worse, by driving determined sufferers into avenue markets.
Over-prescribing was by no means the key issue within the rising charges of opioid overdose deaths. That distinction belongs to illegally manufactured fentanyl and heroin. Prescription opioids get misplaced within the noise.
— Richard A. Lawhern, Ph.D.
