Medical treatment/cost changes due to COVID-19

[disneysteve]

I guess I was assuming that you kept up with the journals, Continuing Ed, that sort of thing.

I think generally speaking folks try their best to stay up to date with things relevant to their practices and specialties. For example, now that I've been doing urgent care for the past 4 years, I mainly attend urgent care CME programs. When I was doing family practice, I focused my reading and education on family practice topics. I was pretty much an expert on the latest treatments for diabetes, for example, since that was a big part of my practice. Now I haven't been involved in managing diabetes for about 3 years and have not done anything to stay on top of the latest advances and newest medications. It's no longer relevant to me. I know that several new drugs have hit the market during that time but I'm only very peripherally aware that they exist.

It is absolutely impossible to keep up with everything in medicine. Things change rapidly. There were 48 new drugs launched in 2019. There have already been about 20 launched so far in 2020. There are new lab tests, markers, genetic therapies, and all sorts of other new procedures being developed all the time. Trust me, it's hard enough to keep up with the ones that you really need to know about. Trying to keep current on all hospital therapies the past 20 years would have been insane.

[kork13]

Interesting potential treatment option... Convalescent plasma infusion -- historically proven, already in emergency use & showing promise. Now we just need to drain blood from a few hundred thousand people!