The recent prominence of the #MeToo movement has shined a light at many places in our society where insidious or even obvious sexism against women has long gone unremarked. Even when noticed it’s just shrugged off as the way things are. In honor of this, #MeToo was named Person of the Year for 2017 by Time Magazine. Medicine is no exception to this pervasive problem. A very interesting recent essay in the New …
Confronting sexism in medicine
Dear CVS,
Please change your hold music.
Please. Do the right thing.
It’ll take you, or someone who works for you, or even a barely pubescent adolescent who nevertheless knows how to program music on his iPhone with more aplomb than anyone born before 1975, only about 48 seconds.
And 48 seconds is substantially less than the amount of time I have listened to your never-changing hold music.
I have researched the source of this …
Dear CVS: Please change your hold music
The following are intended to inspire to medical students and residents to learn more about organized medicine. Whether it be at the national, state, county, or specialty level, there are numerous societies with opportunities for contribution.
1. To pull back the curtain. Many physicians are innately curious and like to “see how the sausage is made,” so to speak. There is a great deal of policy behind the scenes of our …
5 reasons to get involved in organized medicine
Before managed care became the dominant force that it is, patients and doctors had the opportunity to get to know each other well. Doctors treated multiple generations within families. This helped establish a strong bond among patients and their doctors.
While it might have intended to mean preventing expensive care, managed care began to mean organized care. Run by institutions such as health maintenance organizations.
Insurances began to decide which doctors you …
Health care is making the classic mistake that many startups make
It’s a Sunday evening in a local South Texas emergency room with the expected ER traffic for a weekend evening. Lots of simple traumas: ankle sprains, abrasions, lacerations, falls, common URI symptoms, and fevers.
The EMS radios in with a call of a five-year-old male who has altered mental status. The patient is brought in around five minutes later and placed in an open emergency room. The patient is accompanied by …
What happens to the health of children taken from their parents at the border?
You are a child of Thanos.
“Hear me and rejoice!”
“You have had the privilege of being saved by the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association. (Yeah, I know we said the same thing when we prescribed low-fat diets to decrease the risk of heart disease, but you gotta give us a pass on that one.”)
“Based on our research, we have found 100,000,000 of you are ill.”
“But we can …
How our health system is like the Marvel supervillain Thanos
Signing the divorce papers was probably Charlie’s lowest point. His wife sitting by his side, occasionally she would swat at the air at some invisible fly buzzing around the room. There was no fly. Just the acrid smell of the nursing home, a horrifying mix of sweat, shit, and desperation. He tried to focus his aged eyes on the legal papers as the tears swirled past his nose and losing traction, fell …
This is what dying poor in America looks like
A new study confirms something we here at HealthNewsReview.org have been emphasizing for many years: Health news stories often overstate the evidence from a new study, inaccurately claiming that one thing causes another — as in drinking alcohol might help you live longer, facial exercises may keep your cheeks perky, and that diet soda might be a direct line to dementia.
The researchers looked at the 50 “most-shared academic articles and media articles covering them” in …
Health misinformation in the news: Where does it start?
When I hear pundits going on about the Medicaid work requirements, I think of my father.
He has worked in the United States for twenty-four years, taking on the role of a handyman, migrant farmer, truck driver, construction roofer, dialysis patient transporter, and elder transporter. His limited English and third-grade education land him in low-paying jobs with limited hours and an oversupply of workers — resulting in frequent periods of unemployment.
For …
A bipartisan solution for Medicaid work requirements
Absent a last-minute, lifesaving intervention, after 20 years of reviewing and summarizing clinical practice guidelines in a continuously updated database, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s National Guideline Clearinghouse (NGC) will go offline on July 16th. Prior to its untimely death due to budget cuts, the NGC not only served as a one-of-a-kind online resource for clinicians, researchers, and educators, but raised the bar on guideline …
The National Guideline Clearinghouse will go offline. Patients will be worse off.
Most physicians are increasingly forced to grapple with the problem of shortages in generic drugs. These are drugs for which the patent has expired and any company can make them. Certainly for those of us in the PICU it is a chronic problem because the majority of drugs we use are injectable medications that have been generic for many years. Hardly a week goes by I don’t receive a notification …
An innovative approach to fix the generic drug shortage
We’ve all heard the excuse or explanation that “it’s society’s fault,” to explain someone’s failure. We hear expressions like this often when an individual has committed a crime or simply failed to succeed. Personal accountability is diluted as we are told that this person came from an imperfect home, had no role models or ample education.
These arguments are often wielded by those who have been favored with society’s blessings and …
It’s always easier to judge someone’s failures from higher ground
Dr. Eugene Gu. He is — was — a surgical resident at Vanderbilt University. His resume exemplifies academic perfection: valedictorian in high school, undergraduate degree from Stanford, medical degree from Duke, surgical residency at Vanderbilt. He also founded his own research company. Not once throughout the span of his academic or professional career would one have any reason question his capability or competency. But several weeks ago Vanderbilt fired him, citing “performance” issues.
Why?
Because …
A physician was fired for standing up for his beliefs
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They are intangible, as intangible as the space that the death of a loved one leaves behind. There is emptiness where there was once-occupied space. The past tense supersedes the present and definitely any aspect of the future tense and verse. Where they are supposed to be — in our homes, in our cars, at our kitchen tables, out to dinner with us, in our arms — there are only …
A physician’s take on thoughts and prayers
I am a hospitalist at a safety-net hospital. Through my work, I have come to understand how our daily decisions — filtered through our own biases — influence how health care is implemented, and I had a personal teacher in my first year as an attending. Soon after starting my job, I met Mr. K. He was in his 40s, well-kempt, soft-spoken and had the good habit of looking people …
More equitable health care starts with you
Health care has undergone innumerable changes over the last decade, and the pace of change only appears to be accelerating. At the crux of most of the changes we’ve seen is the central problem that the cost of our health care system is unsustainable, and we as a nation need to put the brakes on it. The costs to individual patients are also unacceptably high.
Unfortunately, the prevailing philosophy has been …
A fight for the heart and soul of health care
It’s easy to be excited about facts when they support our own opinions. It’s nice to believe that uncomfortable facts are fake. Likewise, it’s comforting to believe that everyone who disagrees with us is ignorant. When the truth is so obvious, we say, “How could anyone but an uneducated bumpkin deny it?”
And yet, it seems that much of our knowledge is incomplete and that our deeply held beliefs may be …
Today’s unassailable fact could become tomorrow’s flat earth
Recently I posted a piece, describing research out of Johns Hopkins, showing that when patients come to ERs — either with no insurance or insurance that is out-of-network — they often face charges that are four, six, or even ten-fold greater than what Medicare would pay for the same services.
After the post, I was inundated with angry tweets and emails, mainly from emergency medicine …
Don’t blame doctors for outrageous emergency department prices
Vaccines have been hailed by virtually all medical experts, as well as medical historians, as the among the greatest triumphs of public health to occur in the past two centuries. Yet since Jenner first proposed vaccination for smallpox using the vaccinia, or cowpox, virus there have been both skeptics of its effectiveness and people who thought it was dangerous. That is, they had the risk/benefit ratio of vaccination exactly backwards, …
Has the anti-vaccine movement affected vaccination rates?
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Fair Housing Act, which formally outlaws racial discrimination in the sale and rental of housing. The Act, passed in the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., had, at its core, the goal of affirmatively promoting equitable and integrated housing across the United States.
Earlier this year, however, the current presidential administration announced that it would suspend an …
Why physicians should care about structural racism
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