From the monthly archives:

January 2007

A government official is "Fristed"

January 31, 2007

His tumor was diagnosed by a physician watching him on TV.

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GruntDoc PSA

January 31, 2007

Please don’t drink Purell.

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A 93 pound ovarian cyst

January 31, 2007

A woman wondered why she wasn’t losing any weight.

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Newsflash: PCPs juggle multiple problems during office visits

January 31, 2007

More studies of the obvious:
“We documented that on average there are six topics that were discussed, and there is not a lot of time allocated to these topics,” said lead study author Ming Tai-Seale, Ph.D.
During the doctor-patient interactions, the topic that received the most talk time was typically discussed for about five minutes. The remaining [...]

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Healthcare Diseasecare

January 31, 2007

Precisely the problem today:
Ironically, providers incentives to undertreat due to health plan reimbursement rules and structures coexist with incentives to overtreat, compounding the problems for patient value. Incentives to overtreat have four sources. First, physicians and hospitals get paid to treat, not for keeping patients healthy. Second, when reimbursements are squeezed, the incentive to treat [...]

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Sid Schwab talks personally about surgical complications

January 31, 2007

On injuring the common bile duct:
There are two cardinal sins, in my estimation, for the general surgeon. The first, the sine qua non of a surgical screw-up, is injuring the common bile duct. Nailing the bowel with a suture while closing an abdominal incision is the other. Each tends to bespeak carelessness, and I’m sorry [...]

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More brain-dead ideas from the ivory tower

January 31, 2007

Thanks Graham for pointing out this NY Times article. Academic physicians suggest this tact to better communicate with patients:
Doctors should use plain language, not medical jargon, vague terms and words that may have different meanings to a lay person. They should say . . . “You don’t have HIV” instead of “Your HIV test [...]

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IBD on health care reform: "Don’t believe a word of it"

January 31, 2007

Investor’s Business Daily goes against the grain on health care reform:
But is [health care] really a crisis in desperate need of a government solution? The short answer: No.
Unless, of course, you also think that we have a recreation crisis, or a fitness club crisis, or a computer crisis. After all, spending on these and other [...]

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West Virginia editorial: "Tort reform saved health care"

January 31, 2007

Follow-up from yesterday’s story. You can’t argue with the numbers.

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"Smokable" medications

January 31, 2007

A drug company is looking for new ways to absorb medication. First up, “smokable” Compazine for migraines.

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The regulation of medicine

January 31, 2007

Some troubling thoughts for the future of American medicine:
With these decreasing payments and increasing regulation, I think that there will be an increasing number of physicians opting out of Medicare in the next several years. Indeed, it would not surprise me if it becomes difficult to find a decent physician who will be willing to [...]

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Plaintiff lawyer: "He has the power to be 100 percent certain"

January 31, 2007

Herein lies the fundamental disagreement between lawyers and physicians. 100% certainty is an impossibility in medicine, a concept that the legal community has yet to grasp and continues to exploit through malpractice cases.

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What happens when you leave your contact lenses in for a year?

January 31, 2007

Well, don’t do what this guy did:
A Chinese man had to have his contact lenses surgically removed after he did not take them out for a year.
Liu, 40, started to wear contact lenses a year ago and never took them out because he found it difficult.
“I only have some eye drops for when they feel [...]

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