I spent a year as a UCSF postdoc with the leaked tobacco documents. And this article is taken directly from the tobacco-control playbook. In the tobacco wars, we learned that: when a disease is caused by a for-profit industry, the only successful approach is regulation first, followed by treatment.
Here is exactly how and why doctors should regulate EHR and regain control of their cognitive …
How doctors can regain control of their software
Eric Topol wrote an excellent op-ed in the New Yorker titled “Why Doctors Should Organize.” I’m going to spell out exactly how they should organize.
Doctors should form a nationwide class-action lawsuit against the major EHR companies for cognitive repetitive-strain injury. They can easily prove lost wages and mental strain from technical debt in the software interfaces they are being forced to use.
They should demand …
Physicians are getting their asses kicked by technology, but this is reversible if they integrate technology as they do laboratory science.
Medicine needs specialized doctors who only focus on technology. This will combat burnout and take control of a system that has no other incentive to adapt to clinical needs.
In 2013, I graduated medical school and went to Silicon Valley to acquire high-tech skills.
During med school, an investigation …
How physicians are mishandling technology
Physicians have terrible technology, but they refuse to recognize high-tech as a medical specialty. They must integrate technology as they do laboratory science.
Physicians are certainly suffering from poorly-designed electronic medical records (EHR), but they are also guilty of wilful blindness in abdicating responsibility for technology in medicine. This must change.
Physicians have a higher suicide rate than post-combat troops in the military. A lot of this is due …
Why doctors are getting their asses kicked by technology
My patient was trying to kill himself by refusing to treat a bladder infection. I looked down at him. His aura was black, indicating the premeditated murder of a human. Guess they hadn’t caught him for that one. His gang tats were Latin American, and his eyes were black. He didn’t like me much.
I wasn’t phased. He couldn’t do much about it, paralyzed from the neck down.
“It’s not going to …
A gang member shot by cops and paralyzed just wanted a radio
The U.S. Congress is considering regulating one of the most lucrative and powerful companies in the U.S. because teenage girls are attempting suicide over algorithmic images of female bodies.
As an MD-technologist, this is my jam. For over ten years, I’ve been obsessed with how technology makes us sick and how it can be used to make us healthy. So what can we learn from …
The form of functional female bodies
I will tell you exactly
And only the facts.
You are trapped a little for a time
And unhappy
Then your face hollows and it has a death mask
As the soul withdraws from the body
And you look at me and tell me who you see
It is always someone,
Sitting there like me,
But on the other side of things
Waiting for you.
And suddenly you become a column of white light
And leave the body all at once
Going upward,
I …
Medicine is not a business
You fools.
Healing is your blueprint, activated
to complete itself.
A doctor does not broker it,
The best anyone can do is align you
With what you should be,
And stay out of the way.
(Like a teenager setting off an illegal firecracker.)
Mostly, you pay the doctor for the alignment,
And the nurse
To keep the doctor out of the way.
If you’re not ready,
to get on with the business of what you should be,
You come …
Medicine is not a business: a poem
For many years I was not certain physical pain existed.
I know this is rude.
But I felt so little of it.
I could only assume that other people did too.
Like a child, with a skinned knee.
“All better,” I would say, and they would look at me.
Quizzically.
And at the knee and decide.
That it was.
I have been disabused of this recently.
With a pinched nerve in my back.
The universe often disabuses me of things.
Painfully.
If necessary.
“Doctor,” …
Recently, several high-profile institutions have called attention to the issue of inclusion and equity when artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms are applied in medicine. Leaders from the law, medicine, social sciences and computer sciences are speaking out about the challenges of using smart algorithms to solve social problems.
While this topic might easily be dismissed as anti-progress by the tech community, it should be reexamined as a genuine …
Slow thinking and machine learning in medicine
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