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Protest as President Milei's dramatic health care cuts threaten leading Argentine pediatric center

Protest as President Milei's dramatic health care cuts threaten leading Argentine pediatric center

Yahoo18-07-2025
Doctors, residents, and administrative staff from Garrahan Hospital, Argentina's leading pediatric center, protested on Thursday, demanding salary increases from President Javier Milei's government. The unrest at the Garrahan reflects broader dissatisfaction among healthcare professionals under Milei's ultraliberal administration, which has prioritized deep public spending cuts to fight inflation. (AP Video by Victor R. Caivano)
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The notion that older adults—especially women—cannot or should not enjoy a satisfying sex life is both misleading and harmful. Research increasingly shows that positive sexual relationships contribute significantly to overall health and quality of life. In contrast, poor sexual health, including dysfunction, can negatively affect both mental well-being and life satisfaction. One key factor is libido, which may decline with age, though it's not a universal experience. Medical conditions, hormonal changes, medications, lifestyle factors, and relationship dynamics all play a role. For example, it's common for women to experience a dip in libido after childbirth due to exhaustion, hormonal shifts, emotional stress, and body image concerns. I had heard about libido changes after childbirth, but I didn't realize how drastically it would shift. The hormonal changes and sleep deprivation really took a toll, said Ava Parker, 36 (name changed). 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OpenEvidence's Meteoric Rise Is Huge For Doctors
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OpenEvidence's Meteoric Rise Is Huge For Doctors

Medical research and science has never been easier to access. OpenEvidence has raised hundreds of millions of dollars. In its most recent funding round, it raised a $210 million Series B from prominent investors such as Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins, bringing the company's valuation to nearly $3.5 billion. The company's goal is straightforward and incredibly ambitious: to collate the entire corpus of medical knowledge and research developments in a way that is easily accessible to physicians and thereby, improve health outcomes. The service is aiming to provide a similar 'touch and feel' as other generative AI services such as Chat GPT or Google's Gemini—except, its target audience is primarily doctors. Medical science is a rapidly evolving field with a perpetually expanding sea of knowledge, especially as research and development across the fields of disease, therapeutics and human sciences continue to grow. In fact, as Sequoia Capital notes, 'a new PubMed article [which is often the flagship resource for peer-reviewed science studies]The value of this type of technology is increasingly being recognized. The latest models for OpenAI's ChatGPT (GPT 4.1 and o3) have displayed incredible efficacy in taking command of medical knowledge; in May, the company published its work with HealthBench, proposing a rubric for model performance in healthcare and also indicating that GPT's latest models performed at par or even better than standard physician evaluations. Even Google's Gemini family of models has made significant progress in this space; its MedLM suite, for example, is a highly tuned model that can aid the entire healthcare workflow, ranging from answering medical questions to deciphering unstructured health data. Why is all of this important? There are a few different reasons. First and foremost, this technology is aiming to democratize medical knowledge in a way that is easy to access. Furthermore, it comes at a time when the healthcare system, and its respective workforce, is facing unprecedented headwinds. Studies have repeatedly indicated that physician burnout and attrition are incredibly concerning problems for health systems and organizations of all sizes; physicians simply do not have the bandwidth to fulfill all of their patient care duties in addition to the increasingly prevalent administrative, compliance and regulatory burdens placed on them. This also means that there is less time for professional development and continuing education. These technologies can serve as a major advantage to the physician workflow as they provide an opportunity to easily query, fact-check and understand the latest science that is involved with a condition. Carry this even further with tools such as OpenEvidence DeepConsult, which gives physicians access to PhD-level AI agents that can conduct medical research, or Gemini's foundation models that can rapidly decipher medical images, or even AI scribing technology that can rapidly generate patient-physician encounter notes, and soon, hours can be saved from a physician's daily workflow. This translates not only to millions of dollars saved annually in system costs, but also to more time available to spend with patients, improved access to care, and ultimately, increased efficacy and quality of care provided.

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Bob Roda is the President and CEO of Hemosonics. Many people are familiar with food deserts—areas where it is difficult to obtain fresh, healthy food like produce and vegetables—but far fewer are familiar with blood deserts, places where blood supplies are scarce or even sometimes nonexistent. According to a recent article published by Harvard Medical School, "Billions of people live in 'blood deserts,' areas in which the clinical need for blood components cannot be met in at least 75 percent of cases." A blood shortage could prove disastrous in life-threatening cases where a patient needs blood in minutes. Blood deserts aren't just located abroad; numerous rural communities in the U.S. don't have access to crucial blood supplies. Many groups, including the Blood D.E.S.E.R.T. Coalition, have organized to combat the challenge. Hospitals and healthcare organizations, such as the Red Cross, have responded with additional calls for blood donations. 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Chief among them are viscoelastic testing systems. These tests identify whether a patient is at risk for bleeding, the type of blood product they may require and the amount of blood needed. (Full disclosure: My company, HemoSonics, manufactures Quantra, a viscoelastic testing system.) One of the most frequent causes of hospital trauma death is uncontrolled bleeding. However, many of these fatalities are potentially preventable with early, targeted hemostatic intervention. Some technological obstacles include the initial cost of purchasing the technology and training. However, according to the WHO, hospitals that implement viscoelastic testing find they quickly preserve blood, improve patient outcomes, reduce hospital readmissions and reoperations and lower hospital and healthcare facility costs. Other new technologies could also make a difference. Zipline, for example, delivers blood and other critical medical supplies via drones from hospitals and urban areas to blood deserts in Rwanda. There are also 'walking blood banks': new backpack-size kits that contain everything remote medical personnel need to collect and then transfuse blood. Finally, AI and machine learning are also promising: What they do exceedingly well is identify patterns and data and extract crucial findings about blood usage. The findings enable blood banks to allocate resources more effectively and earmark blood donations for underserved areas. AI can also help quickly match a patient with available blood supply, minimizing labor and ensuring patients receive the necessary blood product fast. 4. Utilize mobile blood collection. When blood is collected, it is typically transported to a central site in an urban area for safe storage. Another promising answer to blood deserts is a more targeted use of blood donations. For example, patients in certain areas organize to collect blood for a remote hospital in need. Blood supplies could also be collected and then earmarked for geographic areas where supplies are scarce. Blood donors could also be identified and contacted during a critical regional shortage. The existence of blood deserts is a multilayered social and economic problem that has as much to do with fundamental economic inequities as it does with medical practices. Truly fixing blood deserts will require economic development, improving transportation and supply chains and ensuring an equitable allocation of resources. Nonetheless, the practices above shouldn't be considered just a short-term fix, but rather part of a collective effort to eradicate blood deserts. Combining technology, strategy, activism and public service is a major step in the right direction to conserve blood supplies and address the problem. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?

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