October 3rd, 2011 by Linda Burke-Galloway, M.D. in News
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Three young mothers under the age of 40 are dead because they wanted to be beautiful. Kellee Lee-Howard wanted a slimmer body. Ditto Maria Shortall and Rohie Kah-Orukatan. Shortall worked as a housekeeper; Lee-Howard was the mother of six kids and Kah-Orukotan died at the same place where she received manicures. What do these women have in common besides being minorities? They had liposuction procedures performed by men who offered a discounted price for an elective surgical procedure. These men professed to be competent in performing the procedures but never had accredited training.
I knew this day was coming. I saw the storm long before the clouds emerged. As the insurance payments for professional medical services decreased and declined, physicians began to look for alternative ways to earn money. But was it ethical? Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Linda Burke-Galloway*
August 28th, 2011 by Michael Kirsch, M.D. in Opinion, Research
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Medical malpractice reform is in the news again. Of course, for the medical profession, the medical malpractice system is the wound that simply will not heal. For the plaintiffs bar, in contrast, the medical liability system is the gift that keeps on giving. I have argued that the current system fails on four important fronts.
- Efficiency
- Cost
- Fairness
- Quality Improvement
I admit readily that my profession has not been as diligent as it should be in holding ourselves accountable. We have not been forthright in admitting our medical errors, although can you blame us under the current medical liability construct? Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at MD Whistleblower*
August 26th, 2011 by Jessie Gruman, Ph.D. in Research
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Do you suffer from decision fatigue when you are sick or anxious or overwhelmed by bad health news? Does your doctor make less well-reasoned decisions about the 10th patient she sees before lunch? How about the surgeon during his second operation of the day? How about the radiologist reading the last mammogram in a daily batch of 60?
A provocative article by John Tierney in Sunday’s NYTimes Magazine adds a new layer of complexity to the body of knowledge collecting around decision-making processes. Considerable news reporting has focused on how cognitive biases influence our judgment and how many of us experience the abundance of choices available to us as a burden rather than a privilege. This article adds to that understanding: Our decision-making abilities appear to be powerfully affected by the demands of repeated decision making as they interact with depleted blood glucose levels. That fatigue mounts over a day of making decisions and as blood glucose levels fall between meals. In response, we tend to either make increasingly impulsive decisions without considering the consequences or to make no decisions at all. Tierney describes a study analyzing 1,100 parole decisions by judges over the course of a year: “Prisoners who appeared early in the morning received parole about 70 percent of the time, while those who appeared late in the day were paroled less than 10 percent of the time.”
The effects reported in the article were Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Prepared Patient Forum: What It Takes Blog*
July 23rd, 2011 by Dr. Val Jones in Health Tips, Opinion
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Alright, I admit that the title of this post is a little dramatic. But it really does seem that most people I know socially have had a bad experience with the healthcare system lately. Take for example my friend whose 3- year-old went to the hospital for a common pediatric procedure – the little girl was overdosed on a medicine, aspirated, got pneumonia, went into respiratory distress (noticed first by her mom) and remained in the pediatric ICU for several days. The hospital staff swept the overdose under the rug, and outright denied it happened when faced with direct questioning. As outrageous as that all is, my friend chose not to pursue action against the hospital and staff for their error and behavior. She just “let it go” because no permanent harm had occurred.
Another dear friend was recently misdiagnosed with having a pulmonary condition when he was in heart failure from an arrhythmia… and almost had a stroke during a contraindicated pulmonary stress test. His simple conclusion: “doctors suck.” Was anyone held accountable for this? No. Again because no permanent harm had occurred.
Just the other night I was having dinner with some visitors from out of town. They both told me Read more »
July 16th, 2011 by AndrewSchorr in Opinion
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What? Just what am I talking about? Give me a minute.
More and more people are telling me too often they are encountering doctors who 1) don’t look them in the eye 2) don’t listen to them 3) don’t touch them or get anywhere near them and 4) stay focused on their a) computer b) smartphone or c) iPad.
More of us are saying we are “mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore” just like the character in the movie “Network” years ago. We find another doctor. 
I am happy to report that an increasing number of the gray haired doctors who run medical schools are agreeing with us. Doctors need to be better communicators. They need to celebrate human contact rather than devote themselves to only technology and leading edge science. The professors also want tomorrow’s doctors to know how to work as part of a team. That’s the core of multi-disciplinary care that we talk about all the time these days. It’s smart minds working together for you and me – and to avoid medical errors – which, by the way are estimated to kill 98,000 U.S. patients a year. The idea is Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Andrew's Blog*
Three young mothers under the age of 40 are dead because they wanted to be beautiful. Kellee Lee-Howard wanted a slimmer body. Ditto Maria Shortall and Rohie Kah-Orukatan. Shortall worked as a housekeeper; Lee-Howard was the mother of six kids and Kah-Orukotan died at the same place where she received manicures. What do these women have in common besides being minorities? They had liposuction procedures performed by men who offered a discounted price for an elective surgical procedure. These men professed to be competent in performing the procedures but never had accredited training.
