It is hard to believe that those we love will die.
We can’t bear it. It’s too harsh, too complicated, too fraught with emotional baggage and unfinished business and things never said. It’s too final. Dead is dead, after all. From the moment of our birth, we are dying. Death can be painful, tragic, too soon, too quick, too slow, too easy, or too hard.
So we soften it up a bit.
She …
Dying is final, but passing on lives forever
First aid is defined as the immediate care given to an acutely injured or ill person. It can literally be life-saving so it behooves all of us to know some basic principles.
What follows are some rules that cover common conditions and general practices:
First aid rules that everyone needs to know
How can patients get a straight answer from a doctor?
The answer is really very simple: Don’t accept a non-answer answer from a doctor on a question that really matters to you!
If you get a dodgy, vague, or useless answer don’t take it lying down. Politely insist that the doctor elaborate and clarify until you get a reply that you understand.
We doctors are totally scary, but if you have to have …
Get a straight answer from your doctor
Diana Cole told me, “The internet saved my life,” and recounted a story about using the internet to identify a bat bite and learn about rabies in bats, leading to an emergency room trip.
She later introduced me to her sister, Carolyn Kingston, who attributed her successful outcome from hip replacement surgery to her use of the internet. I asked Carolyn about her general use of the internet for health, her …
Using the internet for health information before surgery
by James Merlino, MD
The patient experience is the right thing to do, and a business necessity. But improving it is not necessarily easy.
The fact is, large medical centers are at a real disadvantage when it comes to performing well on HCAHPS. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) do not discriminate or differentiate the scores of small community hospitals from those of large academic tertiary care …
The patient experience needs to be improved: here’s how
This item has nothing to do with OpenNotes itself – it’s what I’m seeing now that I’ve started accessing my doctor’s notes. In short, I see the clinical impact of not viewing my record as a shared working document.
Here’s the story.
In OpenNotes, patient participants can see the visit notes their primary physicians entered. Note – primary, not specialists. I imagine they needed to keep the study design simple.
So, …
Patients seeing the visit notes their primary physicians entered
by Val Jones, MD
Vaccines have saved more lives than any other medical intervention in history. They are incredibly safe and effective and are well-tolerated by most people. In the US, the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) carefully reviews all reports of adverse reactions that could be associated with vaccines. Over decades of review, they have found that the rate of …
Vaccines and the diseases vaccination can prevent
Patients’ gender preferences for medical care are a factor that we all know exists yet most physicians prefer to ignore it in daily practice hoping that modern medicine is gender neutral. Forty plus years ago when I started in medicine this wasn’t a consideration. Nearly all physicians were men and nurses were women. Patients simply had no choice. Male physicians felt entitled to see all comers and present day women …
Patient gender preferences for medical care
Doctors and nurses are leaders in health care. Being a great leader means having a clear vision, mission or goal. It means being committed, and knowing how to listen and communicate, but it involves much more. It’s about having heart, empathy, and an uplifting spirit.
I value and respect a well written post by Thomas Goetz, author of The Decision Tree: Taking Control of Your Health in the New Era of …
Deeply connect and engage your patients with empathy
Who ever said you have to stay with the same doctor? I am always disappointed when I hear the stories that some people relate about how they sat and told their doctor this and that and that he/she didn’t listen, didn’t know what to do, didn’t care, etc.
Makes me sad of course, because I know how easy it is to just listen and look people in the eyes when they …
Communicating with men and women in the exam room
by Toni Bigby
Lately there has been a lot of conversation around patient empowerment – an ambiguous term, but one that is fodder for many conversations across the health care industry. Patient empowerment – to put it simply – is about providing the necessary tools and information to a patient so that he or she can take a more active and involved position in his or her health …
Do patients want to be empowered or managed?
Though I’ve spoken about breast cancer for Susan G. Komen for the Cure (emphasizing the importance of early screening and detection), until recently I had never had a mammogram. In my training I’d been taught that mammograms weren’t that accurate or useful in women under 40 (our health system’s protocols reflect that), so I got regularly checked by my physician whenever I had a physical and otherwise was waiting until …
What would you do if you had a year left to live?
I understand the frustration and anger in CNN Senior Medical Correspondent Elizabeth Cohen’s new book, The Empowered Patient. I agree that all of the horrible patient stories should have never occurred. As a practicing primary care doctor who has witnessed near misses and bad medical outcomes affect family members, I too wrote a book encouraging patients to be informed and engaged about their care.
The problem is that The Empowered …
Is The Empowered Patient too adversarial?
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More Americans are overweight and out of shape than ever before. Their sedentary, high-calorie lifestyles are causing an epidemic of obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, and degenerative arthritis among other preventable conditions. If those aren’t bad enough, obesity and a sedentary lifestyle also raise the risk of breast cancer, colon cancer, and other common forms of cancer.
Doctors all across the nation are struggling to treat these lifestyle-induced conditions with …
Coaches can help with lifestyle goals in a way that doctors cannot
Well, it happened again. Recently, I was somewhere over Saskatchewan, returning from a lovely Mediterranean cruise, in that uncomfortable semi-conscious state that passes for sleep when you’re flying coach, when the airplane’s PA system rang out:
“If there’s a doctor on board, please ring your call button!”
If you’re old enough to remember the show “To Tell the Truth,” you know what happened next. In the show, four B-list celebrity …
If there’s a doctor on board, please ring your call button!
by Daphne Swancutt
Call it a silly, useless curse. I get sucked in to trying to find patterns and connections anywhere I can. Most of them are silly and useless. Occasionally I find ones that actually make some sense, if only to me.
As a healthcare marketer who also geeks out on reform, genetics and the e-patient movement, I can’t help but try to wrap healthcare up into …
How healthcare marketers can connect with patients
An excerpt from Treat Me, Not My Age: A Doctor’s Guide to Getting the Best Care as You or a Loved One Gets Older.
The bathroom: This is the most dangerous place in the home, what with hard surfaces, water that makes floors slippery, nothing but your birthday suit between you and the tile and tub, and, to top it all off, poor access to a telephone should …
Bathroom, lighting and flooring modifications that can save your life
In the months since the Haitian earthquake, psychologists from around the world have been traveling to the island, hoping to help a population in shock and at risk for post-traumatic stress disorder. Many are veterans of crises such as Hurricane Katrina, and have extensive experience responding to disasters.
But Dr. Guerda Nicolas, a Haitian-born researcher who has conducted landmark studies examining how Haitians experience depression and cope with disasters, has a …
Post traumatic stress disorder after the Haitian earthquake
It’s a simple question, but it has stirred some controversy. It’s the word “friendly.”
Colleague and fellow passionate advocate Bart Windrum got (as my mother would say) his blood in a bubble after reading an article about engaging a patient advocate to help you navigate your healthcare, published in a Tampa newspaper.
In a list of tips about how to advocate for someone else, one tip said, “In hospitals ask, …
How to command respect in any medical setting
In downtown Los Angeles recently, two very different celebrations went on within walking distance of each other.
On West Temple Street, at the beautiful and contemporary Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels—a structure with no right angles in its adobe-colored walls—Catholic Mass was offered throughout the morning, in both English and Spanish. Five blocks south, at the stunningly refurbished Millennium Biltmore Hotel on Grand Avenue, the Council for Secular Humanism, …
Religious coping in dying patients
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