Occasionally, you may encounter patients who you no longer wish to treat. Reasons for ending the physician-patient relationship may include chronic non-compliance, rudeness to office staff, or non-payment of bills.
While these patient behaviors can affect the interactive care-giving process, they may also identify patients with a propensity to file a claim against you. To help reduce the risk …
How to discharge a patient from your practice
by Ted Bacharach, MD
The physicians as a group have been accused of many things. We have been blamed for the high cost of medical care, the depersonalization of physicians and the discontinuity of medical care.
If there was any situation in which we have performed exceptionally well but not been realized by the public, it …
How the medical profession advanced women’s rights
Good primary care physicians are becoming harder and harder to find.
You may not have noticed it yet, but I predict that a year from now we’ll find it almost impossible to find primary care doctors who are willing to take on new patients – at least any primary care doctor worth seeing won’t be …
Smart patients need to establish a relationship with a primary care doctor
Two articles recently highlighted two very different areas of medicine that are quickly colliding and pointing to a new direction for health delivery.
The first, published in the Wall Street Journal, discusses the steady rise of personalized health records through companies like Google, Microsoft, and WebMD. The second, published in USA Today, examines genetic tests and the disconnect between what is available and what physicians understand about …
Personalized health records and genomic tests for patients
At LesliesList.org we get many emails asking where an adult can get low cost vaccines.
It appears the answer is… nowhere. They don’t exist– unless you are an established patient in one of the county-funded or low-cost clinics in your metropolitan area. However, you can save a little money by comparison shopping. I think your best bet is to try one of the walk-in …
Where an adult can get low cost vaccines
In the recent Coen brothers’ remake of the 1969 movie True Grit, Mattie Ross, an intrepid 14-year-old, is determined to hunt down and kill the man who murdered her father.
To accomplish this, she hires U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn, (played by a mumbling Jeff Bridges) a rough, one-eyed veteran of many such quests – then announces that she plans to come along. She figures she is prepared.
After all, she and her …
True Grit and sharing decisions on health care with our doctors
by Diana E. Lee
None of us really wants to sabotage a doctor’s appointment through our own behavior. But it’s easy to do just that by not paying attention to the factors within our control that affect the quality of our appointments.
These are some behaviors to avoid at all costs:
1. Show up late for appointments. It’s an unfortunate …
How to sabotage a doctor’s appointment
by Sally Scroggs, RD
About 130 million Americans will eat out on any given day this year. While dining out shouldn’t mean “pigging out,” picking a salad over cheese fries can sometimes be difficult.
According to the American Cancer Society, making healthy food choices is one of the most important things you can do to reduce your cancer risks. But nutritional experts say many of us don’t make good …
Insomnia plagues me. In that, I’m no different from millions of other Americans. But I am different in that I sought supposed experts to help me deal with this situation. My experience proved to be a nightmare.
First, I believed my sleeplessness due to the fact I feel “on,” all the time, doing too many things in the space of 24 hours. …
Screen your sleep lab when evaluating your insomnia
by Tarcia Edmunds-Jehu
Sitting in an exam room I am watching my patient struggling to ask a difficult question that she clearly does not want to ask.
After several attempts at starting and a few half finished sentences she finally manages to mumble a request for help with obtaining food for herself and her two daughters. She is a 41-year-old woman, 32 weeks pregnant with her third …
Ordering tests may take food out of the mouths of our patients
When it comes to caring for the sick, it’s often assumed that health professionals and their patients usually get along.
But that’s not always true. Sales people call some of their customers difficult. Turns out that doctors do exactly the same thing with theirs. An article in the current issue of the journal Neurology provides a catalog of difficult …
When a patient evokes an emotional reaction from a physician
This has been a very busy week already. I have seen many second opinons and I am always very interested in the reason why the patient initiated the second opinion.
In many situations it was simply to see if I would perform the surgery. After I spent a while listening to the patient, examining them and coming up with an appropriate …
Why patients seek a second opinion
Listening to patients for the past two weeks, we learned quite a bit about what patients appreciated about their doctors and what had left them hurt and confused.
The good:
M., an elderly lady with a very close relationship with her primary care physician, said she had been to many bad doctors in her life. She knew right away that her current doctor …
What your patient appreciates, and what causes hurt and confusion
I imagine the world as a vast, boundless frontier weathered by our swirling human emotions and complicated energies — hurricanes of intense heartbreak and tornadoes of joyous, unbridled celebrations, with every weather pattern in between. Sunshine and rain included.
If I could gather this world, foolishly believing that I could sweep my arms and hands through the unsuspecting air to collect a smaller, more-contained version of reality, I know with absolute …
Becoming the official caregiver to your sick parent
Recently, I had the honor of moderating a discussion for the Sex::Tech 2011 Conference with the producers of MTVs 16 and Pregnant Morgan Freeman, Dia Sokol Savage and The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy.
I was fascinated by the responses of members in the audience as well as the reactions I read while monitoring the online live stream via Twitter. So what did I conclude?
I concluded that the issue of teen pregnancy …
16 and Pregnant is increasing the awareness of teen pregnancy
I will be leaving my current practice in a couple months and starting work at a different clinic in a different city. This type of transition really brings to light how much I had really gotten to know patients on a personal level. This became surprisingly clear not too long ago.
One day, I saw a patient on my schedule that had historically required more of my emotional energy. We often …
Patients can lift doctors up during a challenging day
So I’m watching the 6 pm local news last night and see a piece on KARE-11, my local NBC affiliate, about “a new buzzword called ‘cyberchonrdria'” — used to describe people who “Google their symptoms online and then worry over the multitude of results and possible diagnosis …”
But it’s clear from what they posted online that this was not …
Cyberchondria repackaged as new local TV health news
by Dennis Grace
Recognize the title? It’s from Steve Martin’s 1978 stand-up album, Wild and Crazy Guy. Martin lists How to Make Money Off the Mentally Ill as one of the many books he’s written. The joke is supposed to be on Martin himself, inviting us to ask, “What kind of disreputable jerk takes advantage of the mentally ill?”
But it’s just a …
How to make money off the mentally ill
I woke up in the middle of the night last night and I could not fall back asleep. I had a moment of brilliance laying there in bed. I had discovered a new medical disorder, Wimpy Parent Syndrome (WPS).
For years I have been seeing it in clinical practice, but have been unable to put my finger on exactly what was taking place. Then the idea of WPS came to me and everything …
Wimpy Parent Syndrome, and allowing your child to get mad and cry
If you’re sick, you need people to empathize with you, right? Maybe not.
Empathy is one of those words with a wide variety of definitions, especially in academic settings.
From Wikipedia: “Empathy … cover[s] a broad spectrum, ranging from feeling a concern for other people that creates a desire to help them, experiencing emotions that match another person’s emotions, knowing what the other person is …
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