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Researchers at Thomas Jefferson University announced their intention Friday to build what they called the world's largest patient database for medical marijuana, which will collect health information from over 100,000 users.

The national project - called the MMJ.org Initiative - will launch this summer and expects to reach its goal by the end of the year. Patients in marijuana-legal states will be recruited at dispensaries and through their physicians, said Charles Pollack, director of the Lambert Center for the Study of Medicinal Cannabis and Hemp at Jefferson...

...Volunteer patients will be asked to keep health diaries to document their ailments and their use of cannabis medicines. They will not be paid and they will not receive any cannabis product for participating....

...Twenty-nine states have passed laws allowing cannabis to be used to treat some medical conditions. But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration remains adamant that marijuana has no medicinal value and considers it to be on par with heroin and LSD. With few exceptions, research institutions run the risk of losing federal funding - grants along with Medicaid and Medicare dollars - if they investigate marijuana's effects on humans.
On Thursday, the House Appropriations Committee voted to continue blocking the U.S. Department of Justice from interfering in state medical marijuana laws.

Until the federal agency changes its stance on the drug, randomized clinical trials - the gold standard of research - are nearly impossible. In the meantime, researchers are left to collect data and analyze it. Pennsylvania's state-sanctioned research program, expected to launch early next year, will work in a similar manner, gathering data from patients using medical marijuana.

"Patients are doing self-experimentation," said Frost. Though cannabis dispensaries recommend different strains and dosages for specific illnesses, information is not standardized. "If you allow them to share their results with each other and with scientists, they can drive the research and move this forward."...

A 132-pound ovarian tumor was removed from a 38-year-old Connecticut woman this year, according to two doctors involved in the case.

The patient, who wished to remain anonymous, reported that the tumor began growing at a rate of about 10 pounds per week in November. A medical team, including 12 surgeons, removed it in a five-hour procedure February 14 at Danbury Hospital in Connecticut, according to Dr. Vaagn Andikyan, a gynecologic oncologist for Western Connecticut Health Network and a lead surgeon on the case. ...

I want to talk a bit about the night Colin passed away. It is by no means easy, it hurts a lot. But this week is National Nurse's Week and I don't think people think enough about what this group of men and woman do for us, for our children on our worst days....

...Please say a silent word of thanks that these nurses have what it takes to do what they do, just in case you need them for your child. And if you do, they will be there for you, by your side every, single second. That, I can guarantee.

A Miami hospital's decision not to suspend a pediatric surgeon who was arrested on felony charges is renewing questions about whether hospitals are doing enough to keep patients safe from doctors who may have committed crimes.The doctor was arrested in December and accused of "cybersnooping" on his now-ex-girlfriend. Prosecutors accuse him of logging into her home security cameras almost daily -- sometimes several times a day -- without her permission or knowledge, according to an arrest warrant....

...Hospitals have long been criticized for being too easy on doctors who are accused of questionable behavior, and those concerns have escalated in the #MeToo era.
Hospital disciplinary programs for doctors are mostly "a sham," according to Dr. Robert Wachter, chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. "It is undeniable that hospitals do have a tendency to protect their own, sometimes at the expense of patients," Wachter wrote in his 2005 book, "Internal Bleeding: The Truth Behind America's Terrifying Epidemic of Medical Mistakes."

The pressure on hospitals to be tougher on doctors has increased in the past few months, with The Washington Post, NBC News and others publishing investigations of doctors' behavior.
"The old-school view is don't take surgeons offline; they're valuable. But in the era of #MeToo, we've got to protect patients first," said Art Caplan, director of the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University Langone Medical Center.

'Red flags'
Protecting patients means paying attention to signs that a doctor's behavior might be troubling, said Caplan and other experts who've dealt directly with doctor discipline issues.
These experts said that at their hospitals, the Miami surgeon, would have been suspended while the hospital undertook a full investigation. They said doctors should be suspended and investigated even if the concerns have nothing to do with their technical skills....

There's an acute nursing shortage in the United States, but schools are turning away thousands of qualified applicants as they struggle to expand class size and hire more teachers for nursing programs....

... There are currently about three million nurses in the United States. The country will need to produce more than one million new registered nurses by 2022 to fulfill its health care needs, according to the American Nurses Association estimates.

That's a problem.

In 2017, nursing schools turned away more than 56,000 qualified applicants from undergraduate nursing programs. Going back a decade, nursing schools have annually rejected around 30,000 applicants who met admissions requirements, according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. ..

...For one thing, nursing schools are struggling to hire more qualified teachers. "The annual national faculty vacancy rate in nursing programs is over 7%. That's pretty high," saidRosseter. "It's about two teachers per nursing school or a shortage of 1,565 teachers."
Better pay for working nurses is luring current and potential nurse educators away from teaching. The average salary of a nurse practitioner is $97,000 compared to an average salary of $78,575 for a nursing school assistant professor, according to the American Association of Nurse Practitioners. ....

Defining Hope is a story about people weighing what matters most at the most fragile junctures in life, and the nurses who guide them. It's a documentary that follows patients with life-threatening illness as they make choices about how they want to live, how much medical technology they can accept, what they hope for and how that hope evolves when life is threatened. It is optimistic and reminds us that we have choices in how we die. HOPE.film