Stanford Report, February 23, 2005

Media monitor

Medical school professors were among the leading voices of support for an expert panel's cautious recommendation to doctors on Friday to continue using the painkillers Bextra, Celebrex and Vioxx—but for only a narrow group of patients and at lower doses and for shorter periods.

"All of us have been reacting to the news as it comes forward, as to whether some of our tools will be taken off the market," Raymond Gaea, MD, associate professor of anesthesia, told the New York Times. "This is good news for patients over all. Clearly there are side effects with every medication, but it's really important to weigh the potential side effects versus the benefits for an individual patient." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/health/20pain.html (reg. required)

The remarks from Gaeta, who is also director of Stanford's pain management clinic, were not only featured in Sunday's page one story but were also the paper's Quote of the Day.

Also cited in the story was James Fries, professor of medicine (immunology and rheumatology), who also praised the panel's deicison: "As a physician I like to have a choice of treatments because people are different and some respond well to them." he said.

* * *

There hasn't been any serious talk of coffee being a painkiller, but that morning mug of Joe may be more beneficial to your health than you think. New research from Japan suggests that drinking coffee may help protect against liver cancer. A study of more than 90,000 Japanese found that those who drank coffee daily or nearly every day had half the liver cancer risk of those who never drank coffee. The protective effect occurred in people who drank one to two cups a day and increased at three to four cups.

To get another perspective on the findings, KGO radio broadcast an interview Feb. 15 with Allen Cooper, MD, professor of medicine, who said that the study was well done and raised an interesting association. Still, he added, more work would be needed to prove a causal effect. (Aside from offering useful insights, he also impressed the interview organizers with his terrific radio voice. They remarked that if he ever tires of medicine, he could have a career in broadcasting.)

* * *

Man does not live by coffee alone, but can he live by the federal government's new dietary guidelines? That was the assignment posed by Michael Bauer, executive food and wine editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, who asked four of his writers to spend two weeks living by the new rules. Given how complicated the guidelines can be, Bauer needed an expert to help his writers follow the book and enlisted Jo Ann Hattner, a medical school nutrition consultant, to help them get through their assignment. The result of their reporting appeared in an amusing Feb. 16 article. http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/02/16/FDG44B8THQ1.DTL