It took me until 2010 to buy an iPhone and in just a few years, I’ve become so dependent on it, without fail, I will always make a U-turn to make sure it’s with me — my smartphone is essentially a new limb for me.
I know I’m not alone.
Most did not predict the rocket speed adoption and transformative power of modern smartphones when the iPhone launched in 2007. But, in …
What could a digital future look like in health care?
In the pediatrics playroom, the medical team and I, a medical student, hunkered down in child-sized chairs to review patient progress notes. A television screen nearby diverted my attention. On CNN, video of protesters alternated with Eric Garner’s final moments. The television was mute, but I could hear Garner say, “I can’t breathe …I can’t breathe …” One moment, he is …
Why you should protest the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown
80 percent of prescriptions in the U.S. are for generic medications. Generics are supposed to be less expensive alternatives to brand name drugs. However, prices for certain generics are rapidly increasing. 50 percent of generic medications increased in price in the last year and 10 percent more than doubled in cost during the same time period. Among them are thyroid replacement hormone, doxycycline, digoxin and other heart medications, tetracycline, …
8 tips to save money on generic drugs
While millions of Americans are re-enrolling in Obamacare, signing up for health insurance for the first time, or double-checking the plans their employer offers, many will undoubtedly ask what’s affordable for them.
Good luck defining affordability. Like beauty, it’s in the eye of the beholder.
To better understand what affordability in health care means from the vantage point of the ‘kitchen table,’ the National Quality Forum, with support from the Robert Wood …
5 questions to ask before buying health insurance
I have to thank my colleague @SusannahFox for alerting me to this on my Twitter stream. It was a link to a Washington Post article about a campaign to get people in Belgium to stop Googling their symptoms.
Can this ad campaign get people in Belgium to stop Googling their symptoms? …
Wake up health care: Patients Google it
We sit, we listen, we attempt to focus and absorb what we are required to know. We learn how to give bad news, even using one another as makeshift “standardized” patients. How does one “standardize” a patient anyway? Who knows, who cares, time to cram for the endocrine exam.
But what happens when you stop pretending? When you wake up one morning …
Walk in the shoes of a cancer patient
Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.
– Susan Sontag, Illness as a Metaphor
Words are important. …
Pathographies: Step into our patients’ lives
Jewish history has all too often been written in tears …
I am fascinated by people and groups with the capacity to recover,
Who, having suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Are not defeated by them but fight back,
Strengthened and renewed.
– Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, PhD,To Heal a Fractured World
In some situations, the whole idea of complete recovery from bereavement makes no sense. Bereavement can be fully expected to last a lifetime. …
The Holocaust: Bereavement takes a different course
I have been a victim of diagnostic overshadowing by a primary care physician. I’ve been dealing with major depressive disorder, recurrent, severe and anorexia for twenty-five years — practically my entire adult life. However, I work full-time and I’m a published writer. At the time I saw this PCP, I was on hefty doses of Cymbalta (an antidepressant) and Abilify (an antipsychotic which can also be used to boost the effects of an …
A patient’s experience with diagnostic overshadowing
My illness has been as hard on my caregiver-husband as it’s been on me. I know how fortunate I am that he’s stuck around and that he never complains about the extra burdens he’s had to take on. My heart goes out to those of you who don’t have someone to care for you in this way.
This piece covers several ways …
The e-patient movement represents everything that is positive in medicine today. This grass roots force has introduced shared decision making and empowered both physician and patient. The quality of health care dialogue has risen meteorically both in the exam room and out. Today’s health care “consumer” is more engaged, more intelligent, and more agile at wending their way through the confusing maze of sickness and health.
It’s awfully sad that it …
Why health reform will destroy the e-patient movement
Many of our patients are besieged with unsolicited Internet advertisements offering them unbelievable solutions and cures to most of mankind’s medical maladies. Patients come to and ask for advice about these promises to magically restore their health.
Since I receive so many requests from patients to evaluate these offerings, I have put together five questions that patients should ask themselves before proceeding to buy from websites offering outlandish claims, including restoring …
Health information on the Internet: 5 questions to ask
Just a few years ago it seemed that advocates for health care transparency had scored a big victory. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that they would rate nursing homes by awarding five stars to the best and fewer stars to lower-quality facilities. Families searching for care for loved ones would have access to a familiar rating system to help them make choices. After all, star ratings for …
How to choose a nursing home: Why 5-star ratings may be wrong
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Everyone involved in health care, and particularly hospital care, has witnessed a sea change over the last decade. Things that were never even thought about, let alone formally taught to frontline doctors and nurses, have now come to the forefront.
Chief among these is the drive towards improving patient satisfaction and delivering a more optimal hospital experience. True, a large part of this is due to federal incentives and tying reimbursements …
The worst-case scenario: When patient satisfaction goes too far
Ink is everywhere these days, and I don’t mean on newspapers or in magazines. Tattoos are far more pervasive than I can ever recall in my fifty years. There was a time, when I was young, that boys were awestruck by the old Navy veterans, whose arms bore anchors, and the Marines with Semper Fi across their battle-scarred chests. Occasionally, when …
Consider the messages that tattoos are sending
I wish I had a dollar every time someone gets misty-eyed about the physician-patient relationship — and two dollars every time they say protecting it is the key to health care. That might be true, if you thought health care was awesome circa 1960.
Hereʼs what the physician-patient relationship meant back then: Physicians say, patients pay. We have seen little progress since then. The claim that the relationship is now symmetrical …
Fixing the physician-patient relationship
Jessie Gruman, who sadly died July 14, 2014, was someone I greatly admired as a person and as a patient activist. I interviewed her in late April for research I was conducting on patient activism, and she graciously allowed me to publish the interview, wanting, not surprisingly for those who knew her, to do everything she could to use her experiences …
An interview with Jessie Gruman
Beginning with the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) landmark Quality Chasm report in the late 1990s, the health policy establishment, the medical profession and the American public began to hear a new and disconcerting message: American health care was not patient-centered.
The IOM prescribed a number of recommendations to redesign health care delivery, one calling for patients as the source of control over their care. “Patients should …
In medicine, the patient is not always right
A popular television commercial shows a group of older women playing cards. One woman talks about her friend who is struggling financially since her husband died (the husband only had a small life insurance policy). Another lady said that she doesn’t have to worry about that happening since her husband has an XYZ insurance policy. The other ladies immediately ask about the policy. Then a TV pitchman describes the policy …
Incorporate empathy in patient interactions
Before losing my health insurance in 2009, it never occurred to me to be concerned about a little thing like a blood test. Since 1986 I’d been having three vials of blood drawn each year during my physical. My doctor would authorize it, the nurse would draw the blood in the office and send it to the lab for processing.
A few days later she would call me with the results …
Wildly differing prices for the exact same medical service
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