Massachusetts General Hospital can’t seem to get out of its own way lately.

Already in the doghouse with Bay state public health officials for high mortality rates in its cardiac cath program, the prestigious Harvard Medical School affiliate has suspended its pediatric cardiac surgery program after errors during 2 open-heart surgery procedures caused serious complications.

The public health officials, who have to be considering monthly parking permits in the lot on Fruit Street as a way to control costs, began looking into the incidents shortly after the General notified them last week.

Both babies survived the mishaps, although one sustained neurological damage and required transfer to Children’s Hospital across town.

Just 2 years ago, the General beefed up what had been a tiny pediatric cardiac surgery program by recruiting Jeff Myers, a specialist in the field.

The unfortunate development has reignited debate concerning the extent to which patient outcomes are compromised by policies, or the absence of same, that foster proliferation of multiple low-volume providers for complex, risky procedures like this one.

Children’s Hospital is located just 4 miles west of the General. It does 1,100 pediatric open-heart cases per year, making it the highest-volume program in the country.

The General has managed to log 90 cases in the last 20 months. Meanwhile, about 3 miles south of the General, Tufts Medical Center has a program that did 24 last year.

The General’s “numbers are pretty small” Peter Manning told the Boston Globe. The director of CT surgery at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital added, “when you get below 100 cases you really worry… whether the [surgeon] is doing enough to keep their skills up.”

New results from an ongoing study have raised doubt about the long-term effectiveness of drug therapy for ADHD and provoked bellicose rhetoric between co-authors who disagree about how to interpret their own data.

Results of the first phase of the Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with ADHD were published a decade ago.

They showed that kids receiving Adderall and Concerta did better after 14 months than those receiving talk therapy or routine care.

In 2007 however, MTA scientists published follow-up data showing the positive effects had extinguished.

Treated and untreated kids had no behavioral differences and strikingly, kids taking the drugs were an inch shorter and 6 pounds lighter than the drug-free kids.

Somehow, the corresponding NIMH presser managed to convey that benefits of the drugs had been sustained. Study contributor Peter Jensen was quoted in the release as saying for example, “we were struck by the remarkable improvement in symptoms and functioning across all treatment groups.”

Now, newly released data confirm the drugs have no long-term benefits. The write-up is in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Study co-author William Pelham concluded the drugs work in the short term but are ineffective long term, and that “the stance the group took in the first paper was so strong that people are embarrassed to say they were wrong and we led the whole field astray.”

To which Jensen scoffed that his colleague stood alone with that “silly message,” while adding that kids from troubled backgrounds and those with mild forms of ADHD did do better with drugs in the long term.

Co-authors Brooke Molina and James Swanson concurred with Pelham. “If you want something for tomorrow, medication is the best, but if you want something 3 years from now, it does not matter,” Swanson told the Washington Post.

RealAge has become an Internet sensation by using the results of its 150 question test to assign participants a “biological age” and provide tips about how to improve health and well being.

Typical advice includes flossing your teeth, wearing seatbelts, eating breakfast and taking multivitamins.

The company claims that 27 million people have taken the test, a third of whom have signed on to become RealAge members.

Not all members are aware, however, that Big Pharma pays RealAge to analyze their test results and email promotional messages on its behalf.

Would these people fill out a similarly detailed questionnaire for a drug company?

RealAge has gained popularity in no small part because physician-celebrity Mehmet Oz talks up the program during his gig on Oprah, where he’s known as “America’s Doctor.”

It’s not clear how much the good Dr. Oz is paid for his plugs. 

While taking the RealAge test, people are asked to become RealAge members. It costs nothing and requires only that people provide an email address. Enrollees’ test results go straight into a marketing database.

RealAge customers include GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis and Pfizer. They pay RealAge to identify subpopulations of the membership that are good candidates for one drug or another in their quiver based on certain answer combinations from the 150 question test.

RealAge then distributes promotional emails to the target group.

“If you want to reach males over 60 that (have) high blood pressure in northwest Buffalo that also have a high risk of diabetes, you could,” RealAge VP Andy Mikulak boasted to the New York Times.

“Millions of people have unknowingly signed up,” said Peter Lurie, the deputy director of the Health Research Group at Public Citizen.

RealAge was acquired for $60 million by Hearst Magazines in 2007 when it was doing $20 million in revenue.