Must-read piece by Arnold Kling, on how the recent hospitalization of his father opened his eyes to some hard truths about how medicine is practice in America:

I do not expect health care to be perfect. I do not expect someone with cancer to have an enjoyable experience. I am not threatening to sue anyone, or even to suggest that the care my father received was anything other than far above average. But I do think that there were serious flaws, and that these flaws are systemic.

When Atul Gawande says that “most doctors don’t like taking care of the elderly,” I think he is including my father’s internist and virtually every other doctor that he saw at BJC. None of the doctors touched my father with their hands. Many of them used a stethoscope. The internist looked at the cellulitis. Otherwise, they never examined him. And each specialist was only concerned with his or her particular area–the heart doctors only worried about his heart, the orthopedists only cared that the screws were in correctly, the internist only worried about the cellulitis. Nobody noticed problems with my father’s veins or his skin that were caused by having too many IV’s and spending too much time on his back.