September 11th, 2011 by Happy Hospitalist in Health Policy, Opinion
No Comments »
Missed Diagnosis Lawsuit and the Dynamics of Age Related to Risk
Years ago I had the opportunity to care for Mr Smith, a 101 year old man who presented to the hospital with chest pain and shortness of breath. Besides having 101 year old heart and lungs that tend to follow their own biological clock, this man also had a massive chest tumor filling 85% of one side of his thorax.
Whoah really? What does that mean in a 101 year old man? Most folks this age have exceeded the normal bell curve distribution of life and disease. When you reach 101 years old, there isn’t a lot of chronic anything you can catch with the expected time you have left on earth.
Every now and then, however, we find patients who are the exception to the rule, such as the 101 year old guy that present with a new cancer diagnosis. That’s where being an internist comes in handy. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Happy Hospitalist*
April 18th, 2011 by RyanDuBosar in Research
2 Comments »
Physicians recommend treatments with higher survival rates for their patients, but they make more mental mistakes when they are the patient and have to choose for themselves.
Psychologists know that when people make decisions for others, they are dispassionate enough to be less swayed by extraneous factors. Even toddlers make less impulsive decisions for others than they do for themselves.
Researchers surveyed general internists and family medicine specialists about two scenarios, each with two treatment alternatives. Both outcomes involved a choice between surviving a fatal illness but with sometimes crippling outcomes. Physicians were randomized to groups in which they imagined themselves as the patient facing the decision, or in which they were recommending an option to a patient. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
August 16th, 2009 by Happy Hospitalist in Better Health Network, Humor
No Comments »
A humorous slam at private insurance companies. I read the whole article and wonder how much better life would be, not only for doctors but for patients as well if their third party paid a reasonable bundled fee, with profit potential, and let the patients and the doctors and the hospitals figure out how to divvy up the money. This humor is a take on private insurance companies, but it might as well be the government behind the Medicare National Bank. Neither has been able to control the cost of delivering health care to the masses. The only way to do that is to stop paying for it.
So, Mr. President, I write to you with this demand: we are not a socialist country, one which believes the health of its citizens should come without the proper profit-loss determinations. I believe that my healthcare decisions should be between me, my insurance company plan, my insurance company’s list of approved doctors I am allowed to see and treatments I am allowed to get, my insurance company’s claims department, the insurance company doctors who have never met me, spoken to me or even personally looked at my files, my own preexisting conditions, my insurance company’s crack cost-review and retroactive cancellation and denial squads, my insurance company’s executives and board of directors, my insurance company’s profit requirements, the shareholders, my employer, and my doctor.
via Surgeonsblog
*This blog post was originally published at A Happy Hospitalist*
