On September 16, 2010, I attended Fact or Fiction: ADHD in America, a Capitol Hill Forum, along with Val Jones of Better Health and Rob Lamberts of Musings of a Distractible Mind.The event, coinciding with ADD/ADHD Awareness Week, was a panel discussion discussing the impact ADHD has on our society.It was sponsored by Shire, in partnership with the Entertainment Industries Council (EIC) and the Lab School of Washington [Disclosure: ...
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The emotional resistance to admitting error cannot be legislated away
by Danielle Ofri, MD, PhDIt’s been more than a decade since the seminal report “To Err is Human” by the Institute of Medicine. The report made waves when it estimated that 1.5 million people are affected by medical errors and that nearly 100,000 die annually as a result of medical errors. Some of those numbers have been debated, but there is no doubt that medical ...
Is health care shifting towards convenient retail clinics?
Mark Perry provides an interesting inference from two news stories: a WSJ article that suggests consumers are using less health care and another that reports a big jump in MinuteClinic volumes.
Consumers aren’t necessarily consuming less health care like the WSJ suggests; rather, they are shifting their demand for health care away from expensive, conventional physician offices with limited hours to affordable and convenient retail ...
Contraceptive pill prices have a huge price range
Do you know that the price of a contraceptive pill in Chicago pharmacies varies from $9 (Trinessa, aka generic Tricyclen, at Target pharmacy) to $84 (Loestrin 24 at Kmart pharmacy) a month? That means, over the course of the year, depending on what pill you take and where you shop, you could drop as little as $84 or -- let me get my calculator here -- $1008! These prices are if you pay out ...
Welcome back, now powered by WordPress and Thesis
Thank you all for your patience.The migration took longer than expected, but now the blog is running on WordPress and the acclaimed Thesis theme.Many thanks to Aaron Brazell, aka Technosailor, for doing the job and navigating the obstacles along the way. I am aware that the "Previous entries" link on the bottom of the main page, the Archives, and the RSS feed are not working properly. They are being worked ...
Migrating to WordPress, down for maintenance
There will be no posts over the next few days, as the blog will migrate to WordPress.Furthermore, comments will be temporarily turned off to ensure all of them make the transfer.With over 19,000+ posts, at least twice as many comments, and close to 500 MB of data, it's a major undertaking.When it re-emerges, expect an updated look, better functionality, and improved navigation. The most dramatic changes will be "under ...
6 top medical comments, May 3rd, 2009
Here are some of the more interesting comments readers have left recently.
1. Carla Kakutani on the lack of primary care access in Massachusetts:
So we have a chicken and egg problem. Do we wait health care reform until we have revived US primary care, or is that even possible without health care reform to create the disruption needed to change our entrenched fee-for-service, procedure-happy payment ...
Health insurance doesn’t automatically lead to health care
Well said.
NYU's Marc Siegel writes a poignant op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, echoing much of the sentiment on this blog.
"With more and more doctors dropping out of one insurance plan or another, especially government plans," writes Dr. Siegel, "there is no guarantee that you will be able to see a physician no matter what coverage you have."
He goes on to cite the ...
6 top medical comments, April 19th 2009
Here are some of the more interesting comments readers have left recently.
1. Manalive on quality measures:
It is almost always a leap of faith to apply evidence-based guidelines to the frail elderly, to patients with many medical problems, to alcoholics, to the poorly insured -- in short, to a large percentage of my practice. Accordingly, I have been on the wrong end of too many ...
New reader welcome
Welcome to KevinMD.com, where you'll find opinion, commentary and news from the perspective of a primary care physician. You can read the About page to find out more about me.
Your readership is valued, and I'd like to go over some of the ways you can explore the blog.
Subscribe. Content can be e-mailed to your inbox. Simply enter ...
Why personal health records may be unreliable
Google Health and other personal health records have been touted as a way for patients to actively keep track of their medical history.
However, some of the information, such as diagnoses and the active problem list, are populated using insurance billing codes. This presents a problem, as these codes are notoriously inaccurate, and can reflect a condition that was entered years ago and has since resolved.
5 top medical comments, April 12th 2009
Here are some of the more interesting comments readers have left recently.
1. Dr. Gwenn on limited health literacy:
For us to do a better job with patients and teach them to be better advocates for themselves, we need more time - plain and simple. At the same time, patients need more community supports to understand the complex health world and build the skills they need ...
Ten top medical blog posts, March 2009
Here are the top posts from this past month, based on the number of times they were viewed.
1. Is Natasha Richardson brain dead? Was an epidural bleed, or "talk and die" syndrome, to blame after her ski accident?
2. Did the Canadian health system fail Natasha Richardson?
3. Dying from cervical cancer, and the questions surrounding Jade Goody
4. JAMA ...
RSS feed is down, sorry for the inconvenience
I'm aware that the blog's RSS feed is not working.
Unsurprisingly, the problem is on Blogger's end, and I'll have to wait out a fix.
Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks to all that gave me the heads up on the problem.
Update 3/14 :
I put in a temporary fix, so the feed should be up again. Thanks for your patience.
Ten top medical blog posts, February 2009
Here are the top posts from this past month, based on the number of times they were viewed. Enjoy.
1. How was Nadya Suleman impregnated with octuplets? Is IVF, the mother, or her doctors to blame?
2. Nadya Suleman's fertility specialist Michael Kamrava, and how he's able to stay in practice despite a poor history of successful implantations
3. Ways you can die ...
A note to e-mail subscribers
I recently migrated the site's RSS feed from Feedburner to Google.
After the transition, it seems that I lost subscribers who had received a daily e-mail update from Feedburner.
If you were someone who received a daily update, please re-subscribe, by entering your e-mail address at the top of the middle column, to the right of this post.
Instead of a daily update, you ...
Universal care, increasing patient safety, and tort reform, all in one fell swoop?
Is it possible?
Medical Justice's Jeffrey Segal proposes a model that benefits both patients and doctors, as well as cut costs.
The premise is based on immunizing doctors who follow evidence-based practice guidelines from liability.
As Dr. Segal writes, "Physicians would be armed with knowledge of how to predictably avoid an adversarial legal process. The conventional tort system remains as a backstop incentivizing the doctor to voluntarily ...
Waiting hours to see a doctor, and patients billing physicians for lost time
After waiting hours to see the doctor for a 2-minute visit, some patients have resorted to giving a bill to their physician.
It sounds extreme, but economist Alan Krueger writes that the cost of patient waiting, estimated to be $240 billion in 2007, is neglected when considering the cost of health care.
I'll be the first to admit that many doctors do not appropriately value patient time, ...
Will doctors get a pay cut under a public health option?
It appears so.
The public health option is the centerpiece of a progressive vision of health reform. Some consider it a "backdoor" to a single-payer system, since in theory, a publicly funded option like Medicare should have the cost advantage when compared to its private plan counterparts.
According to some models, however, some of the cost savings will also come at the expense of physician salaries. ...
Andrew Wakefield exposed as a fraud, the autism-vaccine belief is based on falsified data
The man responsible for one of the most significant public health threats of our time has been exposed as a fraud.
Andrew Wakefield, the discredited British scientist whose study "linked" vaccines and autism, has been accused of falsifying data.
According to investigative reporter Brian Deer, "confidential medical documents and interviews with witnesses have established that Andrew Wakefield manipulated patients' data, which triggered fears that the MMR triple vaccine ...
