Patients want to be cared for by doctors who show an interest in them as individuals. It has been a well-known statistic that the average doctor interrupts a patient within 16 seconds after the doctor-patient interview begins. You know full well that few patients can learn to develop an emotional attachment in 16 seconds. This article will discuss 7 steps to develop rapport that will make patients like you, will make them …
7 ways to make patients like you
I’m worried about the future. Everyone I know is stressed. Patients fail to follow up as directed. They fail to take their medications as directed. They have too much to do. Their priority lists are in shambles.
With all the responsibilities that today’s multitasking society thrust on my patients, they don’t even have the time to pick up the phone and call each other; instead, they text, IM, SMS, and email. …
Sometimes cyber-medicine is fraught with danger
As a patient care provider and someone who is occasionally a patient myself, I am going provide some suggestions on ways to know when it is time to consider seeking a second opinion or time to seek a new health care provider. This top 10 list is taken from personal experience.
10 reasons why you need to change doctors
A friend of mine recently took an exotic trip. While shopping in a market, she picked up an appealing item and asked the seller what it cost. She was given a price that seemed high, and paused to consider whether the impulse seemed justified. The shopkeeper grew confused in the silence. Finally he asked my friend, “Don’t you want to know if I can do better?”
Clearly this person was outside …
Health care consumers require a crash course on bargaining
Patients may soon be universally able to view their lab results thanks to a new rule proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services. This means patients may access without permission or release by their providers. This is a victory toward patient empowerment and a step in the right direction.
Classically patients do not see their lab results. The busy primary doctors are often left with nothing more than …
The empowered patient is a relief for physician practice
I once asked a man in his 30’s why he was on disability. He had fallen attempting to ford a swift stream while fishing. He replied: “Well, the judge said I have a bad attitude, I don’t like people and I can’t hold a job.” Shocking as it sounds, it wasn’t very different from other reasons I’ve heard. “I don’t remember, my Dad put me on it.” “I have anxiety.” …
America’s broken disability system
Recently, two executions by lethal injections were carried out in America. One ended the life of Troy Davis in Georgia, the other with too much hate Lawrence Russell Brewer in Texas. Death and dying offer complexity and complications in the profession medicine bound by policies, mandates and laws driven by internal (e.g. professional associations, medical boards) and external (e.g. federal, state, medical center) forces.
Lethal injections involve delivering a fatal dose …
Lethal injections are not good medicine
Patients often pursue litigation simply to obtain information that has not been forthcoming. Research shows that the three things patients want most in the face of medical error are: information about what happened; a sincere apology; and measures to prevent the error from happening to someone else. Financial compensation is lower on the list. Patients generally seek attorneys out of anger rather than greed. When unanticipated adverse outcomes occur, error …
Patients generally seek attorneys out of anger rather than greed
I’m getting married in November and am not “registered” anywhere. Doing so hadn’t even occurred to me until people started asking, “where are you registered?”
At first, I simply laughed. Dan and I have enough for two households. Now I’m re-thinking the bridal registry thing.
Here comes the under-insured, chronically-ill bride going on two years without primary medical care … and I want to register at the Mayo Clinic.
My bridal registry wish list …
A bride who wants to register at the Mayo Clinic
I would like to share a story about my son’s recent surgery that, while only one simple case, reveals the foundational problem with the U.S. health care system.
I write this story as a father of a 12 year old boy who has cerebral palsy. Jack is fortunate to be healthy and active with minor medical needs. As he has grown he experienced some issues with contractures in his right lower …
It is not easy being a patient-consumer, but it can be done
In med school budding doctors are told: “When you hear hoof beats, think horse.” The problem is that sometimes when you hear hoof beats, it’s a zebra, and when that “zebra” is a disease, your patient leaves your office misdiagnosed. I’m that patient.
In 1998 I had my first abdominal attack. I vomited for days and walked hunched over like a frail octogenarian. (For reference, I was extremely fit and twenty-seven …
Learning the hard way that there is an art to medicine
There are many tips to saving money on medical costs like asking your doctor only for generic medications, choosing an insurance plan with a high deductible and lower monthly premiums, going to an urgent care or retail clinic rather than the emergency room, and getting prescriptions mailed rather than go to a pharmacy.
How about getting your old medical records and having them reviewed by a primary care doctor? It …
Doctors can help patients make informed decisions and prevent overtreatment
If death was the end zone, George had been on the one yard line twice in the last five years. And I, as part of his team of doctors, watched as he stubbornly maintained his goal line stand. Miracles rarely happen in medicine. They certainly don’t happen to the same person more then once.
Yesterday as George glided into my office you would have never known that eternity’s grip had been …
My good intentions had helped start a reaction
Pity me as I wish to be pitied. That is the plea of the tortured protagonist in Leo Tolstoy’s brilliant 1886 novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
Tolstoy was born in 1828 into Czarist Russia’s landed gentry. Though orphaned at a young age, he enjoyed the typical privileges wealth and title afforded—passive income, summers in the country, and enrollment at Kazan University. But it was later, after dropping out of school and …
Ivan Ilyich gives voice to the agony of the afflicted
The outsourcing of work by businesses to the cheapest available workers has received a lot of attention in recent years. It has largely escaped notice, however, that the new labor force isn’t necessarily located in Southeast Asia, but is often found here at home and is virtually free. It is us, using our laptops and smart phones to perform more and more functions once carried out by knowledgeable salespeople and …
Interactions about our health care are increasingly conducted online
This post is first and foremost a thank-you note.
Thank you to everyone who posted a comment, emailed me, or tweeted a suggestion in response to my request for input last July: Crowdsourcing a Survey. Six new topics came directly from those conversations. Thank you to Veenu Aulakh and the California HealthCare Foundation who provided funding for the survey. Thank you to Lee …
The online health information divide
“Where there is love of humanity there will be love of the profession.”
-Hippocrates
Reading some of the blog posts and comments on the Internet, you might get the impression that a majority of American doctors hate their jobs. Actually, according Family Practice News, only 35% of my colleagues are unsatisfied with their careers, but that is still a remarkable number.
Are Hippocrates’ words implying an answer to why some doctors today don’t …
Why doctors and patients have turned against each other
This past spring, I wasn’t sure if I was looking through a fun house mirror when I read that Florida pediatricians were going to face criminal charges for bringing up the topic of gun safety in the office with patients. I couldn’t believe what I was reading.
The irony of the whole charade was the reasoning of those who brought about the bill. “Direct questions about firearm ownership when it …
Florida’s gag order on pediatricians blocked
Kids will swallow or poke up their noses, or into their ears the strangest things. I remember during my student days, I was doing a rotation in pediatrics when a 6 year old came into see us. I went in to take the history and her mom told me that her daughter had a very pungent odor to her, which she couldn’t get rid of.
I examined the patient and …
Kids and their fascination with foreign objects
Print out the eye chart, cover one eye, and see how you read it from 20 feet out. I failed line 8 abysmally.
I went for my annual check-up, and I must say, this doctor was thorough. In fact, he was too thorough. He told me way more than I ever wanted to know.
During the two-hour examination, I found out I’ve gained weight (too much ice cream), my blood pressure …
Appropriately dejected after an annual physical
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