The United States is dramatically escalating its efforts to combat the spread of Ebola in West Africa, President Barack Obama will announce Tuesday during a visit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

The unprecedented response will include the deployment of 3,000 U.S. military forces and more than $500 million in defense spending drawn from funding normally used for efforts like the war in Afghanistan, senior administration officials outlined Monday. Obama has called America’s response to the disease a “national-security priority,” with top foreign policy and defense officials leading the government’s efforts.

The officials said Obama believes that in order to best contain the disease, the U.S. must “lead” the global response effort. In the CDC’s largest deployment in response to an epidemic, more than 100 officials from the agency are currently on the ground and $175 million has been allocated to West Africa to help combat…

It’s a public health conundrum: Current screening guidelines lead to an overdiagnosis of diseases like cancer, which results in overtreatment for ailments that might never seriously impact a person’s health.

We’ve heard the overdiagnosis argument in the U.S. before, especially surrounding breast cancer; in 2009, the United States Preventive Services Task Force recommended against annual breast cancer screening starting at age 40 and instead advised women get mammograms starting at age 50.

Now, two new studies published Monday in the medical journal BMJ highlight the global problem with overtreatment in both breast cancer and heart disease.

In a new analysis report, a team of researchers conclude that hypertension is being overtreated in people with mild cases of the disease. The researchers write that about 40% of adults worldwide have hypertension, and more than half of those people have mild cases of the disease (meaning they’re low risk and don’t…

The woman who showed up in the emergency room of Boston Medical Center with a life-threatening apparent overdose of painkillers was contrite. She promised to follow a plan to ease her pain with medications that did not contain opioids, the principal ingredient of prescription drugs including oxycodone and fentanyl whose vast increase in use has led to an epidemic of overdoses.

Then she went across town and got another doctor to prescribe them anyway.

This kind of “doctor-shopping” by patients addicted to opioids is one of the primary reasons drug overdoses have become the leading cause of injury death in the Unites States. There were nearly 17,000 fatal overdoses of pain medications in 2011, the last year for which the figure is available, according to the Centers for Disease Control—more than from heroin and cocaine combined, and triple the number in 1990.

Yet 12 years after the launch of a…

Ebola is ravaging West Africa like a wildfire out of control.

The morning I woke up with Ebola, I felt a little warm. My temperature was 100.0–higher than normal, but not too concerning. I decided to stay home from work that morning just to play it safe. I had spent the last seven weeks fighting the world’s worst Ebola outbreak in Liberia, where I was working as a physician with Samaritan’s Purse. I thought I just had a cold, but I was not naive enough to think I was immune to the possibility of Ebola.

By noon, my temperature had increased to 101.4. I took a rapid malaria test; it was negative–not a good sign. I called our team leader, who sent physician colleagues to my home in full protective gear.

After two more negative malaria tests, I knew I would be in isolation for at least three more…

More than 100 scientists and industry executives will convene this week at the WHO’s headquarters Geneva, Switzerland, in response to a spiraling Ebola crisis. Their urgent mission will be to comb through the world’s stock of experimental Ebola drugs and vaccines and agree on a plan for clinical trials.

The Sept. 4 to Sept. 5 meeting comes about a month after the WHO said that while it had a “moral duty” to conduct clinical trials, treating Ebola patients with drugs never previously tested on humans would be ethical given the severity of the crisis.

Experimental Ebola drugs – though still wildcards – have been touted as possible miracle workers in the international fight to quell the outbreak, the worst on record. The epidemic has subsumed Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia, and it has appeared in Nigeria, Senegal, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

ZMapp, one of the drugs before the…

Drug maker Novartis released highly anticipated results from its clinical trial, PARADIGM-HF, showing its new heart failure drug cut cardiovascular deaths by 20%. The results were announced at the European Society of Cardiology meeting on Saturday.

Novartis has been testing a drug called LCZ696 for chronic heart failure in hopes of replacing ACE inhibitors, one of the mainstays of heart failure treatment. In March, an ethics council that was monitoring the trial data simultaneously requested the company end the trial since it was clear that participants using LCZ696 lived longer without being hospitalized for heart failure compared to those using the standard-care ACE inhibitor, enalapril.

Anticipation over the drug’s results has been mounting since the recommended closure of the trial; results were so impressive that the treatment showed potential to become the next standard of care. The latest trial showed significantly more patients on LCZ696 were alive, and they had…

Most GPs I know pride themselves on being true generalists, and have gravitated towards this area of medicine because they enjoy the challenge and variety that comes with the territory. They also tend to value holistic, patient-centered care and the satisfaction that comes with long term doctor-patient relationships.  

Inevitalby, though, each GP has strengths and weaknesses when it comes to their clinical expertise. For me personally, I’m very confident with women’s health, pretty good with infants and neonates, comfortable with suturing and minor procedures, but much less assured when it comes to men’s reproductive health, elderly patients with complex mutli-comorbiditiy, and skin cancer checks, for example. 

I’m not overly concerned by this, and nor should my patients be. I feel that I’ve got enough of a grasp of the basics that I can at least make the first steps towards investigating and managing pretty much any presenting complaint, and am happy to do some…