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Latest Posts

Why Physicians Should Weigh In On Healthcare Reform

It’s interesting to see how different things are over at The Health Care Blog.  First, it’s different to have to write “health care” instead of healthcare.  I personally am all for not using up or resources by adding the space between the two words.  Ihaveconsideredeliminatingspacesaltogether, but it gets confusing.  Iwon’tdothat.

One of the big differences I see is the perspective of the readers and commenters.  I write here for a group of people I largely consider friends, cohorts, or at least sympathetic to my cause.  After all, people are coming here by their own volition (I assume nobody is getting this blog forced upon them as some sort of punishment, although that may be a bad assumption).  But the readers at THCB (as we insiders call it) are much more argumentative and much more likely to be “experts” in the area of healthcare delivery.  Certainly the other folks writing there are far more sophisticated than me (not that that’s a hard thing), and are much more well-read in the area of HC reform.  The debates in the comments section are quite stimulating, although sometimes you have to wipe a little blood off of your screen. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Musings of a Distractible Mind*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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