What is it about?
This article is about modern healthcare set against the backdrop of diseases like urethral stricture & prostate cancer. We discuss PROs & health measurement scales; surgery for conditions of the penis & urethra; the length & quality of people's lives; the type of care people may choose at the end of their natural life; health economics, money & QALYs; pharma & the hidden downside of expensive anti-cancer drugs; and the way all these important things hang together in the world today.
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Why is it important?
We identified for the first time that there is an unmet need across health & social care worldwide for a much more sophisticated way to measure the abstract & intangible but phenomenally important concept that sits under the umbrella of words like quality of life & wellbeing. It should be possible to do this more accurately in the near future through complex realtime analysis of personal stories from social media & biometric information from ubiquitous personal devices like iPhones.
Perspectives
I *hope* this article makes what people might think is a boring, slightly abstract area like health economics and measuring things like health, kind of interesting and maybe even exciting. Because the way we spend money on health and social care is not just a problem for politicians, managers and researchers to worry about - it is an issue that touches every single human being on this planet in one way or another. More than anything else, and if nothing else, I hope you find this article thought-provoking.
Matthew James Jackson
Newcastle University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Quality and length of life, money and urethral stricture disease, Current Opinion in Urology, July 2015, Wolters Kluwer Health,
DOI: 10.1097/mou.0000000000000179.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Research paper about a scarf called SWARM
Microsoft reveal SWARM, a garment designed to help someone think about their own emotional state, change the way they feel, and read the emotional states of other people.
Google say humans could live for 500 years
This MailOnline article is about Google's widely reported ambitions for human health, wellbeing and increasing the length of our lives dramatically.
NIHR/MRC call for new wellbeing measure
Since this Current Opinion article went to press two major UK health research funding bodies (MRC and NIHR) have jointly invited applications through the Methodology Research Programme to conduct research into the possibility of creating a brand new way to measure of quality of life.
What are urethral strictures?
A urethral stricture is basically just a scar of the urine pipe in the penis. This scar makes the pipe narrow causing reduced flow of urine, which can lead a whole host of problems for people with the condition.
Lancet editorial about end-of-life care in children
Doctors in the UK faced with helping parents make difficult decisions about treatment for children with life-threatening or life-limiting conditions were given some new advice by the UK Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) recently.
JAMA article about the role states have in improving spending transparency in healthcare
This opinion piece talks about ways that states in North America can do more to make important information about the cost of healthcare public.
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