If you have been in practice for more than 10 years, you are probably familiar with the concept of professional courtesy where doctors treat their colleagues without charging them. With reimbursement decreasing and overhead expenses rising, many physicians have started charging their colleagues when they provide their fellow colleagues with medical services.
What is the position of the AMA? The AMA advises that physicians should be aware that forgiveness or waiver ...
Read more...
The medical profession has always been marked by division: town versus gown, primary care versus specialty medicine, states versus national. But the real fault line today is not defined by specialty, geography, or teaching versus practice, but by size of practice.
Physicians in smaller practices, without regard to specialty or where they are located, are embattled and defensive—and therefore are more skeptical when someone tries to peddle the need for delivery ...
Read more...
There was a night when I was in training that all the decisions, disasters and chaos, which are the practice of medicine, caught up to me. In those dark hours, I felt practically despondent. What I had seen left me in tears and overwhelmed by the tasks in front of me.
At that moment a wise attending physician took a moment to sit with me. Rather than tell me how wonderful ...
Read more...
I got into medicine because it is fun, and, of course, to help people. I think most of my colleagues did so as well. I get up every day and I get to go to work and figure out puzzles all day. How cool is that? Sure, it may not always be unwarranted or a bad thing, but testing and more testing can definitely take the fun out of taking ...
Read more...
Every month, hundreds of thousands of people look for a doctor on Google. As an amazing practitioner, your site deserves to be seen by these patients, and that means being on the first page of search results. Getting on that first page can be tricky, but there is one ridiculously easy thing you can do to improve your chances – and it takes less than 7 minutes.
Searching for a doctor
When ...
Read more...
At no other time in my medical training was I as confident that, with hard work and dedication, I could master the field of internal medicine as when I was a newly minted third year medical student.
Fresh from having taken the USMLE step 1, I interpreted my ability to recite the mechanism of penicillin resistance or the role of histamine in the immune response, and describe in great detail the ...
Read more...
Physicians as guardians of science have an obligation to teach the facts of life to our patients and our legislators. And today the need to dispel ignorance of biologic facts is more urgent than ever. Just as President Obama is deferring legislation on marriage to the states, I will defer the issue of whether the government can or should regulate marriage to legal scholars and our duly elected representatives. However, ...
Read more...
The trouble with many significant advances in medicine is that that they take us out of our moral depth. They may raise quite different problems from the ones we are used to and, if we are not careful, we may inadvertently undermine the wonderful potential of new technologies by forcing them into existing legal, ethical and institutional frameworks.
Transplantation is a case in point. Transplants save and transform lives; but the ...
Read more...
All of us would like, whenever possible, to have a bilateral referral arrangement with our colleagues. Have you ever experienced a situation in which you are sending patients to another physician and receiving no reverse referrals? Of course, you can change your referral source, hoping that the other physician will notice that there is a decrease in referrals and will call you to ask what happened, but do not hold ...
Read more...
Recently, I passed my friend and colleague, Dr. Ekaterini Tsiapali, in the stairwell. We rarely get to catch up these days, so it was really quite a nice surprise to see her.
"What did you do this weekend?" I asked.
"I watched Wit, you know, the movie where Emma Thompson plays Dr. Vivian Bearing, a 50-year-old woman with terminal ovarian cancer? She's such ...
Read more...
"A comprehensive and extremely useful roadmap for doctors."
-Eric Topol, MD, author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine
Learn More...
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