What are your thoughts on vitamin supplements, especially anti-oxidants?

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Swedish researchers report that antioxidants make cancers worse in mice. It’s already known that the antioxidant beta-carotene exacerbates lung cancers in humans. Not exactly what you’d expect given the extravagant — and incessant — claims you hear made about the miraculous effects of antioxidants.

In fact, they are either useless or harmful, conclude the editors of the prestigious Annals of Internal Medicine: “Beta-carotene, vitamin E, and possibly high doses of vitamin A supplements are harmful.” Moreover, “other antioxidants, folic acid and B vitamins, and multivitamin and mineral supplements are ineffective for preventing mortality or morbidity due to major chronic diseases.” So useless are the supplements, write the editors, that we should stop wasting time even studying them: “Further large prevention trials are no longer justified.”

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Emergency room usage: It’s long been assumed that insuring the uninsured would save huge amounts of money because they wouldn’t have to keep using the emergency room, which is very expensive. Indeed, that was one of the prime financial rationales underlying both Romneycare and Obamacare.

Well, in a randomized study, Oregon recently found that when the uninsured were put on Medicaid, they increased their ER usage by 40 percent.

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Electronic records will save zillions: That’s why the federal government is forcing doctors to convert to electronic health records (EHR), threatening penalties for those who don’t by the end of 2014. All in the name of digital efficiency, of course. Yet one of the earliest effects of the EHR mandate is to create a whole new category of previously unnecessary health workers. Scribes, as they are called, now trail the doctor, room to room, entering data.

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