The more I try to help people in this field of mine, the more I realize that it doesn't take a village. It takes a huge industrialized city, all its wires and arteries humming with constant activity, just to try and make one woman better. In this case, one smiling woman in her 50s, ethnicity I couldn't figure and of dubious relevance, who came to our clinic seeking advice about ...
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The blogosphere is alive with the sound of Silver -- Nate Silver, that is, the head of what should be called the FiveThirtyEight Modeling Agency. Silver constructs statistical models to calculate the probability of electoral outcomes. Though he hasn't shared his model yet, the results fit his model very well.
Is that the point? Statistical models can be constructed to serve various ...
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I was chatting with someone who asked what I did for a living, and I told him I am a doctor. "The kind that helps people?" he joked.
I knew what he meant. The MD is the practical fixer, the PhD the omphalocentric academic. Many believe in this dichotomy, as false as it is. And such a philosophy underlies the opposition to some elements of the PPACA, aka Obamacare.
There's a board of ...
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Atul Gawande, MD, is a technophile and a believer in the checklist, and he yokes these ideologies to an attractive metaphor in his newest essay for the New Yorker. The article is worth reading in its entirety, but it can be easily paraphrased.
The Cheescake Factory, like other successful restaurant chains, has "brought chain production to complicated sit-down meals." They've done it by far-reaching standardization of the best possible ...
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I took a deep breath. I had to think carefully. It's not that this was unexpected - Johns Hopkins has been anointed the country's best hospital for 21 years running by US News. But I wanted to tell the patient the truth without alienating them or failing to mention the many admirable aspects of my institution.
One truth, however, cannot be denied: to call one hospital the best is not simple.
Let's ...
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A number of respected physicians have called for a renewed emphasis on the physical exam. Perhaps most prominently, Abraham Verghese has joined with colleagues at Stanford University to publicize the Stanford 25, a list of physical-exam maneuvers that they hold should be required of internal medicine residents.
These calls reflect in part the fear that checklist medicine will lead to doctors' obsession with what Jerome Groopman calls the "iPatient" (the ...
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Johns Hopkins Hospital is consistently named one of the best in the country. I can't disagree with that; after all, I just started working there as an internist in September. Coincidentally, in the midst of the raging debate around health care reform, the past few months have seen increasing discussion of a small but crucial question: why do some of the best hospitals spend more money than others? If other ...
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"A comprehensive and extremely useful roadmap for doctors."
-Eric Topol, MD, author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine
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Past 6 Months
Dear lawmakers: This is what it’s like to be a doctor today
Matthew Moeller, MD | PhysicianA gun owner responds to Sandy Hook
Edwin Leap, MD | PhysicianIs Chris Christie too obese to run for president?
Jeffrey Parks, MD | PhysicianIf I’m wrong about guns, can you please explain why?
Claire McCarthy, MD | PhysicianPrimary care doctors may no longer be needed
Doug Olson, MD | PhysicianWalgreens moves into primary care, and it’s our own damn fault
Kevin Pho, MD | Kevin's Take