Articles: health.
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Since 2020, there has been a significant cultural and political backlash in the USA to growing acceptance of gender diversity and gender-affirming care. Legislative attacks, particularly targeting gender-affirming care access for transgender and gender diverse youth, have occurred in a media environment rife with misinformation and disinformation. Even in states where a ban is not enacted, we have seen significant harm caused by such misinformation and disinformation, to transgender and gender diverse patients, their families, and clinicians who provide this important and much needed care, in the form of clinic closures and disruption of services. In this hostile sociopolitical environment, we present strategies for health care organizations and workers to continue to provide this lifesaving care thoughtfully, to safeguard the protections currently in place, and to continue to advocate for patients, families, and health care staff.
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Biomarkers are becoming crucial in ever more medical tasks and are proposed to change medicine in profound ways. By biomarking ever more attributes of human life, they tend to blur the distinction between health and disease and come to characterize life as such. Not only do biomarkers strongly influence the professional conception of disease by pervading ever more diagnoses, but they also impact patients' experience of illness. To manage how biomarkers influence patients, professionals, and societies, we urgently need to move from identifying potentially relevant biomarkers to determine their meaning and value to individuals, professionals, and public health.
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Editorial
Direct Primary Care: Financial Analysis and Potential to Reshape the U.S. Healthcare Landscape.
As the United States faces a looming shortage of primary care physicians and escalating rates of clinician burnout, there is a pressing need to explore alternative models of primary care delivery. Direct Primary Care (DPC) is an emerging primary care model in which patients enroll in a membership plan and make direct monthly or yearly payments to a DPC practice for specific primary care services. ⋯ We demonstrate that the DPC practice can yield upwards of $25,000 in annual cost savings over the FFS practice while also providing more personalized patient care. Thus, we argue that the cost-effectiveness and value-based approach of DPC positions the model as a transformative force in reshaping the American healthcare landscape towards a more patient-centric, accessible, and resilient future.