October 20th, 2010 by Davis Liu, M.D. in Better Health Network, Health Policy, News, Opinion
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The first-year medical students I precept were too young to see Tom Cruise’s alter ego Lieutenant Pete “Maverick” Mitchell grace the big screen in the 1986 blockbuster film “Top Gun.” Yet, the story has a relevant analogy to medicine.
According to the film, during the Vietnam war American pilots were relying too much on technology to bring enemy fighters down. They weren’t as skilled in taking out the opposition. They fired their technologically advanced missiles to try and get the job done. They didn’t think. It didn’t work. They forgot the art of dogfighting.
The military discovered that technology alone wasn’t going to get the job done. The best fighter pilots needed the skills, insight, and wisdom on when to use technology and when not to. As a result, the Navy Fighter Weapons School, known simply as Top Gun, was created to retrain the military pilots on this vital lost skill. The goal of the program was specifically to make the best of the best even better.
Like the military, the country is discovering that the healthcare system enabled with dazzling technology isn’t getting the job done either. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Saving Money and Surviving the Healthcare Crisis*
August 7th, 2010 by KevinMD in Better Health Network, News, Opinion, Research
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A recent study from the Annals of Internal Medicine found that doctors often discounted a patient’s social situation when making a medical diagnosis.
Lead researcher Saul Weiner “arranged to send actors playing patients into physicians’ offices and discovered that errors occurred in 78 percent of cases when socioeconomic concerns were a significant factor.”
Evan Falchuk, commenting on the results, provides some context:
It’s hard to expect even the most gifted clinician, trying to make it through yet another week of a hundred or more patient encounters, to get these difficult decisions right. Too much of the context of a patient’s care gets lost in the endless churn of patient visits that the health care system imposes on doctors.I suspect this is enormously frustrating for doctors, although it’s worse for patients. What the researchers call a failure to “individualize care,” a patient might call “not being paid attention to.” It’s a dynamic that anyone who’s been ill has probably seen firsthand.
These findings are entirely unsurprising. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at KevinMD.com*
July 14th, 2010 by KevinMD in Better Health Network, Health Policy, News, Opinion
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There’s little question that medical school debt is rising rapidly, affecting the career choice of medical students.
It’s one of the main reasons why the disparity between the number of specialists and primary care doctors is widening. There have been a variety of proposed solutions — most recent of which are medical schools completely subsidizing their tuition. I think that’s a good step forward, but so far has only been limited to a few schools nationwide. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at KevinMD.com*
June 16th, 2010 by KevinMD in Better Health Network, Health Policy, News, Opinion, True Stories
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There’s little question that the workplace environment for doctors is deteriorating. Especially in primary care, where physicians are arguably needed the most.
That’s why is so disheartening to read this Newsweek essay from pediatrician Karen Li, explaining why she left the field. Much of her piece can be attributed to the bad old days of managed care, where doctors were frustrated by the bureaucratic impediments placed before them. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at KevinMD.com*
June 16th, 2010 by Davis Liu, M.D. in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Health Tips, News, Opinion, Research
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The Associated Press has been running a fantastic series of must reads with the latest article highlighting the consequence of too many imaging studies, like X-rays and CT scans, which are the biggest contributor to an individual’s total radiation exposure in a lifetime. Americans get more imaging radiation exposure and testing than people from other industrialized countries.
Reasons for doing too many tests include malpractice fear, patient demands for imaging, the difficulty in obtaining imaging results from other doctors or hospitals, as well as advanced technologies, like coronary angioplasty, which have increased radiation but avoid a far more invasive surgery like heart bypass. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Saving Money and Surviving the Healthcare Crisis*