While the percentage of commercial support for continuing medical education (CME) has continued to drastically drop over the past few years (29% decrease from 2007 to 2009), recent data, which show an epidemic of medication errors in hospitals, make this decrease even more troublesome.
At a time when 30 million more patients will flood our hospitals, do we really need to …
Commercial CME funding and the rise of medical errors
Year: 1994
Setting: Port Moresby General Hospital, Papua New Guinea
Position: Chief medical officer for Chevron Oil Co.
The wife of an expatriate employee has injured her arm and, suspecting that she has fractured her left elbow, I accompany her to the Port Moresby hospital for further evaluation. The building looks good and new. In fact, it was recently donated to Papua New Guinea by the Japanese government.
While waiting for the X-rays, I …
How developing countries use foreign health aid matters
It is insulting to think that doctors who are ostensibly smart enough to save one’s life are in fact so stupid, or merely gullible enough, to be swept away by what is in actuality only a very weak potion of sales-presentation intermixed with and embedded within generally informative and pharmaceutical-balanced subject-focused medical lectures.
Such lectures occur usually at a private function room at a restaurant or, in conjunction with a served …
Pharmaceutical sponsored dinners have educational value
What is the purpose of the note in the patient chart?
Depends who you’re asking.
The best guidance I ever received on how to write a good note came from my residency program director, who told us that a note needn’t be encyclopedic to be excellent; in fact, he urged us to get away from the “second-year medical student” style, which typically includes absolutely everything.
Instead, he urged us to write, as concisely …
Notes in the chart are helping patients less
A guest column by the American Board of Internal Medicine, exclusive to KevinMD.com.
The concept of patient-centered care was catapulted into the mainstream by the publication in 2001 of the seminal Institute of Medicine report Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century. This report identified six aims of improvement for the U.S. …
ABIM: Patient centered care is crucial in health reform
Unlike climate change, where there’s a large contingent of denialists who spread doubt about the scientific evidence, no one denies that antibiotic resistance is a problem. There is controversy, however, on the question of just how much the widespread use of antibiotics contributes to the problem.
The mechanism is not in dispute: If you expose bacteria to antibiotics, they will mutate to become resistant. But “overuse” of antibiotics is not the …
Bacterial resistance to chronic antibiotics, and why it’s a problem
I received a very troubling phone call from a close friend recently. He underwent a study, at the age of 40, and the physician came out of the procedure and said, “you have a large tumor, do you want me to call a surgeon for you.”
The purpose of this post is not to comment on the physician’s behavior or delivery techniques, but to define this very precarious and anxiety producing …
Minimize patient waiting after a potential cancer diagnosis
by Emily P. Walker
The number of obese adults in the U.S. continues to rise, despite a growing number of federal anti-obesity initiatives in the past two years, according to a new report.
The seventh annual “F as in Fat” report, released Tuesday by the nonprofit Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, found that obesity rates continued to rise in 28 states from 2007 through 2009.
Nationally, two-thirds of …
Obesity in American children and adults continues to grow
Every time you see a depiction of someone sleeping on TV or in the movies, you’ll see the person sleeping on his or her back, and oftentimes, snoring.
The lay public, doctors, and even alternative and complementary practitioners naturally assume that you’re able to breathe properly at night. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Evolutionary biologists and comparative anatomists have stated that speech and language development was ultimately detrimental to humans. …
Breathe properly at night and learn to sleep better
by Jeff Brandt
I wrote an article for KevinMD.com several months ago discussing the benefits of Android for the healthcare market. I also compared Android with the iPhone. I listed the iPhone’s technical shortcomings and really angered the “believers of all things Apple”. That was not my intent.
Apple’s latest release of iPhone 4.0 and their new operating system (OS) 4.0 corrects many of …
Android and iPhone pros and cons for healthcare
OncRN is a wonderful blog written by an anonymous author sharing stories and insights in her line of work that many times speak to palliative themes. S/he says it best in her blog description,
my life gets intermittantly (sic) rocked by the wonders/horrors of being an oncology nurse. i just need to talk it all through sometimes.
A recent post is about how to say good-bye to our patients, particularly …
How to say goodbye to patients
Recently, the New York Times reported that Harlem Hospital Center had finally completed its investigation into thousands of echocardiograms that after receiving an initial reading by a technician had never been read by a physician.
It turns out that out of 7,000 tests that went unread, only 14 patients “might have been misdiagnosed because their tests had not been handled properly,” according to the hospital spokeswoman quoted in the story. …
Unread echocardiogram fallout at Harlem Hospital Center
For at least the last 20 years, graduates of U.S. medical schools have resisted pleas from organized and disorganized medicine to become primary care physicians (PCPs). Since there is already a severe shortage of PCPs, pundits are wondering who is going to take care of the hordes of newly insured by 2014. Many have speculated about the possible reasons for this dilemma such as the relatively paltry earning potential of …
Create a family practice mystique in medical school
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by Charles Bankhead
Reanalysis of a landmark cholesterol-lowering trial of people typically considered at low risk for heart attacks indicated that the results are flawed — and do not support the primary-prevention benefits that made headlines, authors of the review asserted.
The reanalysis of the massive JUPITER trial involving almost 18,000 people with low or normal cholesterol but elevated levels of the inflammatory biomarker C-reactive protein (CRP) — turned up no evidence …
Was JUPITER trial data influenced by AstraZeneca to favor Crestor?
by Marianna Rakovitsky, RPh
Oh, Summer! The weather is warm, the sun is shining and it is the time when we try to get outside as much as possible. Summer is my favorite time of the year. I love the beach, days that are filled with light and sunshine, trips to the orchards and hanging out in the backyard. The sunshine that makes the summer such a …
Medications that increase the risk of photosensitivity
A while back I did in a post where I asked the question, What can patients really expect from their physicians today? In that post, I wondered at the fact that many patients still have a high degree of trust in their physician in spite of the quality and safety problems attributed to physicians in the press.
For example:
Is patient adherence responsible for health quality and safety?
Death is not the enemy. We all die.
The enemies of patients and physicians are premature death, disease, disability, pain, human suffering.
I believe that all people deserve a death with dignity and without pain. Palliative care is the right mode for as many as 80% of all Americans who will die of chronic progressive incurable diseases. Eighty percent of those state that they do not want to die in a hospital …
Every patient deserves a death with dignity and without pain
Since 1997 the number of US medical students choosing to go into primary care has decreased by more than 50%.
It seems that sources as diverse as the Obama Administration and the Wall Street Journal think that we should find a way to encourage medical students to choose primary care specialties in order to allow Americans to have the best and most cost effective care. This is very problematic when primary …
Pay specialists less to save primary care
A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine touched off another salvo about how non-clinicians have no problems judging the abilities of clinicians in the world of medicine.
The article begins by presenting the case of a woman who awoke with facial paralysis and then went to the emergency department. On arrival, she received CT scans and MRI scans of her brain. When those were normal, she was diagnosed …
The difficulty of regulating x-ray radiation in the ER
by Michael Smith
Clinicians treating dying patients did well in managing pain but fell short on communicating with patients and their loved ones, researchers said.
The findings, from a single-institution study, suggest that those who care for terminal patients also often failed to assess shortness of breath in a dying patient whose mechanical ventilation was withdrawn, according to Anne Walling, MD, of the University of California Los Angeles, and colleagues.
But overall those …
Caring for dying patients needs better physician communication
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