February 21st, 2011 by Bryan Vartabedian, M.D. in Opinion, Research
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More in the evolving meme of narrative medicine: Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (my alma mater) have found that for a select population of individuals, listening to personal narratives helps control blood pressure. While the power of stories is old news, the connection to clinical outcomes is what’s newsworthy here. Read Dr. Pauline Chen’s nice piece in the New York Times. The implications for ongoing work in this area are mind boggling.
The Annals of Internal Medicine study authors sum it up nicely:
Emerging evidence suggests that storytelling, or narrative communication, may offer a unique opportunity to promote evidence-based choices in a culturally appropriate context. Stories can help listeners make meaning of their lives, and listeners may be influenced if they actively engage in a story, identify themselves with the storyteller, and picture themselves taking part in the action.
This nascent field of narrative medicine caught my eye when I stumbled onto the work of Rita Charon and the concept of the parallel chart. Extrapolation to social media may be the next iteration of this kind of work.
*This blog post was originally published at 33 Charts*
February 19th, 2011 by KevinMD in Health Policy, Research
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The recurring narrative among health reformers is that hospitals that provide more care raise health costs, but don’t necessarily improve quality. This has lead to a backlash against so-called “aggressive” hospitals and doctors, with upcoming financial penalties to match. But the situation, as always, appears to be more nuanced than that.
In her column in the New York Times, Dr. Pauline Chen looks at one subset of patients who actually may benefit from aggressive care: Those who suffer surgical complications. The study,
found no difference in the rate of complications for aggressive and nonaggressive hospitals. But when they looked at all the patients who had complications and examined their outcomes, the researchers found that regardless of the urgency of their operations, those patients who were cared for at more aggressive hospitals were significantly more likely to survive their complications than those who had their operations at less aggressive hospitals.
In addition, the investigators found that characteristics associated with intensity of care treated surgical complications better:
… a hospital’s failure or success in treating surgical complications correlated consistently with factors that also characterized intensity of care — general expenditures, intensive care unit use and the total days of hospitalization — they found that benefits of this more aggressive care extended well beyond the time of the operation.
I constantly remind readers of this blog that more medicine isn’t necessarily better. The counter-intuitive findings from the Dartmouth Atlas study have been instructive in convincing patients that they are, in many cases, overtreated. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at KevinMD.com*
February 14th, 2011 by RamonaBatesMD in Better Health Network, Book Reviews
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Listening to NPR on Saturday morning I caught part of Scott Simon’s interview with brothers Stephen Amidon and Thomas Amidon, M.D. discussing their book “The Sublime Engine: A Biography of the Human Heart.” The interview touched on the story of the human heart in science and medicine, history, and culture:
It turns out that the classic red heart symbol we see almost everywhere around Valentine’s Day doesn’t look much like a real human heart at all.
“Of all the theories about where that symbol comes from, my favorite is that it is a representation of a sixth century B.C. aphrodisiac from northern Africa,” says Stephen Amidon…”And I kind of like that history because it sort of suggests that early on, people sort of understood the connection between love and the heart.”
Words and how we use them were the focus of Dr. Pauline Chen’s interview by WIHI host Madge Kaplan this past Thursday, February 10th, “A Legible Prescription for Health“:
On this edition of WIHI, Dr. Chen wants to spend some time talking about language, especially the words doctors use with one another when describing patients; the unintended barriers created the more doctors and nurses don protective, infection-protecting garb; the mounting weight of patient satisfaction surveys; and more.
Back to the NPR interview on the human heart as a “sublime engine,” the authors don’t feel that as our advances in surgical techniques become commonplace that the heart will lose any of its cultural and metaphorical significance. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Suture for a Living*
February 5th, 2011 by KevinMD in Opinion, Research
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Female doctors make less than male physicians. That conclusion gained major media traction recently. A recent post on KevinMD.com by medical student Emily Lu had some great conversation discussing reasons why women make less money in medicine.
To recap, the study from Health Affairs concluded that,
newly-trained physicians who are women are being paid significantly lower salaries than their male counterparts according to a new study. The authors identify an unexplained gender gap in starting salaries for physicians that has been growing steadily since 1999, increasing from a difference of $3,600 in 1999 to $16,819 in 2008. This gap exists even after accounting for gender differences in determinants of salary including medical specialty, hours worked, and practice type, say the authors.
Everyone hypothesized all sorts of reasons. Female doctors prefer more family-friendly hours and less call, which may impact their salary. Women are simply worse negotiators than men. Blatant sexism exists when hiring new physicians. Money isn’t as important to women as it is to men. All of which may, or may not, be true. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at KevinMD.com*
December 5th, 2010 by DavedeBronkart in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Health Tips, News, Opinion, Research
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A year ago Gangadhar Sulkunte shared his story here about how he and his wife became e-patients of necessity, and succeeded, resolving a significant issue through empowered, engaged research. As today’s guest post shows, he’s now actively engaged in thinking about healthcare at the level of national policy, as well – and he calls for all patients to speak up about this new issue. – Dave
I recently came across a Pauline Chen piece in the New York Times, “Listening to Patients Living With Illness.” It refers to a paper by Dr. Wu et al, “Adding The Patient Perspective To Comparative Effectiveness Research.” According to the paper and the NY Times article, Dr. Wu and his co-authors propose:
- Making patient-reported outcomes a more routine part of clinical studies and practice and administrative data collection.
- In some cases requiring the information for reimbursement.
Patient-Centered Outcomes is outcomes from medical care that are important to patients. The medical community/research focuses on the standard metrics related to survival and physiological outcomes (how well is the part of the body being treated?). In the patient-centered outcomes research, they will also focus on outcomes important to patients such as quality of life. In other words, the care experience will be viewed through the eyes of the patients and their support groups to ensure that their concerns are also addressed. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at e-Patients.net*
