One of the topics I went to China to discuss was our medical school’s approach to teaching medical ethics.
At Wuhan University they have a first-year course, but I was told by both the school administrators and some of the students that the material is dry and not seen of immediate importance, so students often skip the class.
Here’s how …
Medical ethics at hospitals and medical schools in China
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 …
I received a phone call from the Broward Sheriff’s Office Police Athletic League Youth Boxing Program asking if I would help them out and be the fight physician at their upcoming youth boxing tournament.
Their usual physician, a member of the Boxing Hall of Fame, had another commitment. However, he was willing to train me in advance and show me the ropes on the day of the event.
State law and the …
A boxing fight physician experience
There is a lot of buzz over the creation of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA).
An ACO is a network of health care providers and hospitals that collaboratively manage patient care and prospective budgets. Perhaps the biggest draw of ACOs is the potential to create innovative ways to improve quality and decrease costs. To …
Accountable Care Organizations and the need to innovate
Every major industry is now computerized with one glaring exception; health care delivery. Thirty years after Steve Jobs began selling personal computers out of his garage, far less than 50% of physician practices and hospitals have converted to any form of electronic medical record.
The vast majority of medical documentation is still done via paper and writing utensil just as it …
Why some EMR programmers think physicians are stupid
A reader recently wrote to me: “Brandon, in our area, we’ve seen a few retail clinics pop up. What can we do as a practice to let patients know that visiting retail clinics is not in their best interest?”
We had along discussion. So I put together a summary of our conversation. Below is a rundown, more of less, of what I …
How physician practices can compete with retail clinics
One of the “Crown Jewels” of the 2010 holiday movie season may be The King’s Speech. The film centers on Colin Firth, who plays King George VI of Britain, and Geoffrey Rush as Lionel Logue, the speech therapist who helps the king deal with his stutter.
Born Albert Frederick Arthur George, the second son of King George V, he spent most of his early years out of the spotlight, which centered …
What is stuttering, how is it treated, and The King’s Speech
Recently, KevinMD.com picked up my post on empathy or should I say the lack of it. I received some engaging comments.
One comment in particular caught my attention.
The contributor for some reason equated “being empathetic” with “giving in” to patient requests presumably during routine office visits. Here’s a direct quote:
Give the patients what they want! Antibiotics are OK for colds. The patients want them. So …
Does empathy mean giving patients what they want?
I was talking to a young man who is starting medical school this fall. His tuition at one of South Carolina’s newer schools will be $40,000 per year. That’s admittedly on the high end. On the low end, it runs a paltry $33,000 per year.
And this is all after college, of course. He and others like him are taking out loans to the tune of $240,000 to pay for their …
Why medical education needs to be more affordable
Pauline Chen had a post in the New York Times recently about surgical informed consent. Informed consent is an important part of the surgeon/patient communication transaction.
Surgeon reviews the proposed operation, the rationale behind it, and the possible complications. For example— a patient comes in with biliary colic. We describe the anatomy and pathology. We aver that surgical resection will lead to …
Implications of the surgical buy in when discussing informed consent
One of my Facebook updates on my private account was that I “have a love-hate relationship with interleukin-6. Yes, macrophages and T cells, I know you are doing your job, but how many proinflammatory cytokines does it really take to fight this thing? What’s that? Be grateful you guys are even working? Oh, all right. I’ll shut up and eat my soup now.”
Yes, I’ve been sick this week. It started …
Calling in sick serves as a reminder for compassion for this doctor
One of the top hits that comes up on the Oracle of Googlius for “astroturf” is for the original company, now renamed SYNLawn, but still proudly stating, “We invented synthetic grass,” which is what astroturf is. More recently, this already synthetic term has become a verb, as in “astroturfing.”
My favorite of all credible information sources on the web, Wikipedia, has this to say about it:
Astroturfing denotes political, advertising, or public relations campaigns that are formally …
How astroturfing disease affects patients
A guest column by the American College of Physicians, exclusive to KevinMD.com.
by John Tooker, MD, MBA, MACP
Last month, my KevinMD.com column introduced a concept paper published in the Annals of Internal Medicine by Owens and colleagues titled High-Value, Cost-Conscious Health Care: Concepts for Clinicians to Evaluate the Benefits, Harms, and Costs of Medical Interventions. …
ACP: Benefits, harms, and quality in high value, cost conscious care
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The results of the application of reductionism in modern biomedical research and practice has been nothing short of miraculous, but while wondrous for some things, reductionism alone is incomplete.
The basic premise of reductionism is that by breaking down (or “reducing”) complex biological or medical phenomena into their many parts, one is much more likely to understand a single cause and devise a cure.
Historically, the invention of the microscope, the defining …
Reductionism and daily medical practice
I went to needle exchange to hang out. You may be asking yourself what a soccer mom from the burbs is doing perched on a folding chair in the parking garage of 101 Grove on a dark November night, surrounded by syringes.
I was there as a guest observer because I’m working on a series of articles about mortality and homelessness, as part of an Annenberg California Health Journalism Fellowship I …
Overeating is not a surgical problem.
This may seem to be a statement of the obvious, but the solution to a behavioral problem is not surgery. Overeating is not a surgical problem — it is a behavioral one. The problem is not because the stomach is too big and needs to be made smaller. It is a function of how …
Overeating is a behavioral problem, not a surgical one
Here are a few facts to enliven the next public discussion about death panels.
An analysis of Medicare claims by researchers at Dartmouth University found that nationwide nearly one in three cancer patients died in hospitals or in intensive care, the most expensive form of end-of-life care and contrary to most patients’ wishes. Nearly half are not offered hospice …
Reduce variations in cancer care that do not improve outcomes
It’s only been a little over fifty years since vaccinations became routine for the childhood killers like polio, measles, mumps and whooping cough. People my age and older had no choice but to suffer through childhood infectious diseases given how effectively and quickly they spread through a community.
Most of us survived, subsequently blessed with life long natural immunity. Some did not survive. …
Vaccination and the killers of yesterday now overcome by modern medicine
The following op-ed was published on February 22nd, 2011 in AOL News.
If you woke up one day with an earache, you could call your doctor’s office for help. Or you could do what the majority of patients do today and Google what to do first.
Type “earache” into your Web browser and the results can vary wildly. Search engines can return results saying that an earache can be from the common cold, …
Guiding patients online is a new physician responsibility for the digital age
by Joanne Wilkinson, MD
I have a stress test nearly every year. I do this because my mother dropped dead of a heart attack when she was thirty-six, and now I am thirty-five.
They stick EKG leads on me, and for weeks I have blotchy red circles on my skin where it’s reacted to the adhesive. I run on …
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