Radiation on the brain: MedCity Morning Read, Dec. 8, 2009

Highlights of the interesting and the important from the world of health care:

FDA investigating radiation levels in CT scans: Add two more California hospitals to the FDA’s list of health care institutions suspected of exposing patients to dangerous levels of radiation. The agency is investigating reports of excessive radiation during brain scans at Glendale Adventist Medical Center and Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, Calif, the Associated Press reports.

The problem with excessive radiation in CT scans popped up to the FDA in October after patients at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles reported losing hair or skin redness. The hospital last month said 260 patients were exposed to excess radiation, up from prior reports of 206. The FDA is also looking into reports of excessive radiation at an unspecified Hunstville, Ala., hospital.

With CT scans a popular diagnostic tool for everything from stomach aches to seizures, we’ll probably be hearing more from the FDA on the topic in the coming months. Is excessive radiation in CT scans the next big health-care controversy?

Grow your own organs: Say goodbye to long waiting lists for replacement organs. Lab-grown body parts, made using a patient’s own tissue, could become commonplace in the future, according to a report in the Chicago Tribune. How does it work?

Cells from an organ to be replaced are put into nutrients, where they multiply and create a “soup,” explained Dr. Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in North Carolina. The “soup” of cells is “painted” on a form or scaffolding in the shape of the organ, say a bladder, and placed into an incubator. A new bladder grows in about six weeks.

Health care as agriculture: It’s widely agreed that federal health-overhaul efforts as they’re currently structured would do little control costs, or “bend the cost curve” to use a popular phrase. But that’s not such a bad thing, according to the influential Atul Gawande, surgeon, journalist and one-time surgeon general candidate.

Gawande argues that America’s health care cost problems can’t be solved outright; rather the problem lends itself only to iterative, trial-and-error solutions, not grand designs, as the Wall Street Journal reports. And that’s where health care’s parallels with agriculture come into play, Gawande argues in a piece in the New Yorker. At the turn of the 20th century America was faced with skyrocketing food costs, so the government set up farming “extension agents” to share ideas and tips with local farmers on how to boost crop output. The plan worked and brought down food costs, Gawande says. So, too, could small pilot programs benefit health care across the country, Gawande says.

Problems at Sermo: The leading social networking site for physicians, Sermo.com, is retrenching, according to Xconomy.com. The company’s revenue model has been to sell access to observers, such as Wall Street firms, who could benefit from monitoring physicians’ attitudes about certain technologies or drugs, but apparently too few financial services firms are buying in. Now, once-high-flying Sermo, which has attracted nearly $40 million in venture capital, is changing its strategy to focus more on Pharma companies and could lay off as much as a third of its staff, unidentified tipsters tell Xconomy.

The company’s struggles only underscore reasons why physicians may never have their own Facebook.