Daily Briefing for November 4, 2026

Asthma guideline ranks steroid rescue inhalers above albuterol alone The voices on this episode are generated, and so is the script, from the day's post at Physician in the Loop. Every fact in the post links to its source. Read the post and its sources Get the free email briefing The American Thoracic Society on Nov. 3 strongly recommended steroid-containing rescue inhalers over short-acting beta-agonists alone for adolescents and adults with mild asthma, in a new guideline . The same day, the Food and Drug Administration warned that holes can form in some ButterflyBVM bag-valve-mask resuscitators and told users to remove the worst-affected lots. A National Institutes of Health cohort found that half of adults with long COVID at one year improved meaningfully by three years, and a Columbia study of nearly 1 million portal replies found that Epic's AI drafts did not shorten clinicians' overall response times. In this episode Thoracic society strongly recommends steroid-containing rescue inhalers over short-acting beta-agonists alone for mild asthma FDA warns holes can form in ButterflyBVM bag-valve masks, letting breaths leak away from patients Half of adults with long COVID at 1 year improve meaningfully by 3 years, but only about a quarter fully recover, RECOVER finds Columbia clinicians answered portal messages 8.6% slower after Epic's AI draft replies arrived, a 983,154-message study finds Humana opens electronic prior authorization to more than 180,000 athenahealth clinicians nationwide A quarter of Kaiser emergency patients with six common conditions were treated at home, in clinics or in observation instead of a bed Stents and bypass surgery show matching 10-year survival for left main disease in a 5,379-patient registry