Kenneth Lin, MD

Kenneth Lin is a family physician who blogs at Common Sense Family Doctor.

What does it take for a cancer researcher to know cancer?

Physician

June 27, 2014

In my line of work, it’s not uncommon for a civil debate about the evidence for a cancer screening test (such as the PSA test for prostate cancer) to rapidly degenerate into the other person questioning my motives or suggesting that the real reason I oppose disseminating or requiring insurers to pay for a test is because I secretly want patients to suffer lingering and painful deaths. (“He obviously doesn’t care about …

Can conflicting guidelines be good for patients?

Kenneth Lin, MD

Physician

June 17, 2014

After I left my position as a staffer for the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force in November 2010, it was three years before I was tapped for another guideline post, this time at the American Academy of Family Physicians. Recently I joined the AAFP’s Commission on Health of the Public and Science, which formulates guidance for family physicians on a variety of topics, including clinical preventive services. My appointment coincided …

A physician’s guide to interpreting cancer statistics

Kenneth Lin, MD

Conditions

June 2, 2014

I’ve had many Twitter conversations with cancer screening advocates who fear that the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force’s “D” (don’t do it) recommendation against PSA-based screening for prostate cancer will lead to a dramatic spike in prostate cancer deaths as primary care physicians screen more selectively, or perhaps stop screening at all.

I seriously doubt these apocalyptic forecasts (for one thing, prostate cancer causes only 3% of deaths in men, and the decline …

Reducing the handoff errors after hospital discharge

Kenneth Lin, MD

Physician

May 15, 2014

As a long distance runner on my high school track team, I won few accolades in individual events, but shone in relays. My teammates and I spent hours perfecting our baton exchanges, which must occur within a limited area of the track, until these handoffs felt smooth and effortless. In contrast, world class athletes focused on individual performances are often assigned to relay teams at the last minute, a practice …

Having health insurance is not the same as receiving health care

Kenneth Lin, MD

Policy

April 30, 2014

“Health insurance is not health care.”

That is not original. I borrowed it from Los Angeles County Department of Health Services Director Mitchell Katz’s JAMA Internal Medicine editorial about problems with ensuring access to health care for Medicaid recipients whose cheap public insurance usually doesn’t even pay doctors enough to recoup costs of care, let alone earn a living.

But somehow, during the impassioned political debates that preceded Obamacare, the botched rollout of …

When free preventive screening tests aren’t really free

Kenneth Lin, MD

Physician

April 17, 2014

I recently spoke to a class of undergraduates about the benefits, harms and politics of screening smokers for lung cancer using low-dose CT scans. Afterwards, a student asked how I felt about the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that Medicare and private insurers cover U.S. Preventive Services Task Force “A” and “B” recommended screening tests and other preventive services without co-payments or deductibles, making them free at the point of care.

I admitted that …

Problems with the proposed solutions to the primary care shortage

Kenneth Lin, MD

Policy

April 3, 2014

Projecting future physician workforce needs is a challenging calculation that must take multiple variables into account to avoid missing its mark. In the mid-1990s, the American Medical Association confidently predicted that the penetration of managed care would lead to a large “physician surplus” and convinced Congress to cap the number of graduate medical education (GME) positions subsidized by the Medicare program.

Two decades later, there is a widespread consensus that the U.S. is …

The impersonal nature of medical school personal statements

Kenneth Lin, MD

Education

March 11, 2014

Since becoming a full-time medical school faculty member again, I’ve volunteered to interview about two applicants each month from September through March. When I first started doing this, I was surprised that the admissions office did not provide me with a copy of the applicant’s resume and essay until the time of the interview, carried in a manila folder by the applicant.

But I quickly realized that it wasn’t necessary to …

Health reform: Forward progress or a temporary dislocation?

Kenneth Lin, MD

Policy

February 13, 2014

A little over a month ago, my family of five moved to a more spacious and modern house in the same neighborhood. I’m slowly getting adjusted to our new place — the locations of the light switches, how to operate the refrigerator’s automatic ice maker, which cycle to choose among the dozen different options displayed on our high-end washing machine. It still takes me a few minutes longer to get …

How scut work has changed for today’s generation of doctors

Kenneth Lin, MD

Physician

December 27, 2013

When I was an acting medicine intern in Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital at the turn of the century, all employees who provided the hospital’s “ancillary services” went home between the hours of 5pm and 8am. It was the job of the on-call interns to fill in. If a patient needed a stat blood draw or IV line replacement in the middle of the night, his nurse paged the intern to do it. If …

Rwanda provides primary care lessons we can learn from

Kenneth Lin, MD

Policy

December 5, 2013

As reviewed in many other sources, the relative underinvestment of resources in primary care in the U.S. has a great deal to do with the fact that we spend far more on health services than anywhere else in the world but rank near the back of the pack in key health metrics such as life expectancy, infant mortality, and disability compared to other high-income countries. Although economic inequality, lack …

Will any of these solutions save primary care?

Kenneth Lin, MD

Physician

November 22, 2013

Researchers at the American Academy of Family Physicians’ Robert Graham Center have estimated that the U.S. will require 52,000 additional primary care physicians by 2025 due to the effects of population growth, aging, and insurance expansion. Since it takes at least eleven years of post-secondary education to train a family physician, even a renewed surge of student interest in primary care careers is unlikely to meet this anticipated need.

Another recent Read more…

Will any of these solutions save primary care?

Physicians are the biggest driver of health costs

Kenneth Lin, MD

Policy

November 8, 2013

There are many reasons to be dismayed by the error-filled and managerially incompetent rollout of the federal health insurance exchanges that are in many ways the linchpin of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. I sympathize with commentators who have called for the resignation of Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. It’s hard to imagine Franklin Roosevelt not firing someone in his cabinet had social security stumbled this …

I support the Affordable Care Act, but not Obamacare

Kenneth Lin, MD

Policy

October 7, 2013

More than three years after being signed into law, and more than a year after surviving a Supreme Court challenge, the Affordable Care Act, more commonly known as Obamacare, finally begins to fulfill its promise. Most of this country has long since taken sides, despite appalling gaps in popular understanding of what the law means, what it does, and what it doesn’t do.

Let me admit that I’ve never had particularly …

We are spending billions to train the wrong kind of doctors

Kenneth Lin, MD

Education

July 26, 2013

Earlier this year, the physicians at my academic family medicine practice met with two senior officials from our parent health care organization to be oriented to its new initiatives and projects. Their presentation documented the organization’s ongoing investments of many millions of dollars into renovating subspecialty care suites and purchasing new radiology equipment that was likely to be highly profitable, but provide dubious benefits to patients.

Two of my colleagues asked …

Is medical liability reason enough to continue a low value practice?

Kenneth Lin, MD

Conditions

July 2, 2013

The family medicine residency inpatient service that I supervise admitted several patients from the emergency department with acute chest pain that had resolved. Most of them had no history of cardiovascular disease, but were deemed to have enough risk factors to undergo pre-discharge cardiac stress testing after they had “ruled out” for acute coronary syndrome with normal cardiac enzymes.

Rationales for the American Heart Association’s recommendation for routine stress testing …

Protect patients from the effects of biased research

Kenneth Lin, MD

Meds

June 23, 2013

Approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to market a new drug is a critical waypoint along the path to profits for pharmaceutical manufacturers. Unfortunately, recent case studies have illustrated that FDA approval does not necessarily provide assurances of effectiveness and safety.

In last month’s Georgetown University Health Policy seminar, we discussed two examples, anemia drugs and the diabetes drug rosiglitazone (Avandia), which were …

The worst kind of guideline in prostate cancer screening

Kenneth Lin, MD

Conditions

June 12, 2013

Before critiquing the American College of Physicians’ recent guidance statement on screening for prostate cancer, I will begin by saying that I generally hold the ACP’s clinical guideline development process in high regard. They often base their guidelines on comprehensive and methodologically sound reviews of the evidence produced by Evidence-Based Practice Centers.

In some cases, when several good-quality guidelines are already available, the ACP chooses not to reinvent the wheel …

Wary about the Angelina Jolie effect on breast cancer screening

Kenneth Lin, MD

Conditions

May 31, 2013

There is nothing like a celebrity to call attention to a preventable disease, especially if that disease is cancer. In March 2000, then-Today Show host Katie Couric, whose husband Jay Monahan died of colorectal cancer in 1998, underwent a live colonoscopy to promote uptake of colorectal cancer screening. Over the next 9 months, national colonoscopy utilization rates rose by 20 percent, a phenomenon that researchers dubbed “Read more…

Wary about the Angelina Jolie effect on breast cancer screening