April 8th, 2011 by PhilBaumannRN in Opinion
Tags: Blogging, Facebook, Full Range Of Affect, Honesty, Nursing, Social Media, Twitter
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“The world will be better if you share more.” That’s what Mark Zuckerberg claims. And it’s part of a general philosophy of many fans of social media: that they help us to be more “social”, friendlier, cooperative, collaborative…in other words better.
But what – in truth – is the default mode of social media? On the surface, one would think “social”. That can’t be true though, for no technologies have social implanted in them – by definition, human-social belongs to humans.
So when I dip into my Twitter stream, for instance, I see huge volumes of people saying nice things, quoting positive aphorisms, replying to each other with accolades. If you didn’t know any better, you might conclude these are conversations between people who’ve know each other for decades. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Phil Baumann*
April 7th, 2011 by Shadowfax in Opinion, Quackery Exposed
Tags: Bad Advice, Bad Science, Huffington Post, HuffPo, Misinformation, Poor Journalism, Quackery, Reiki, Snake Oil, Unreliable Health Information, Warning
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Going to the Huffington Post for medical information is perhaps comparable to going to Vito Corleone for advice on income tax compliance. Another prominent blogger refers to is as “that hive of scum and quackery,” a lovely and accurate epithet for a media outlet which provides refuge and cover for anti-vaccationists, homeopaths and practictioners of reiki and other such pseudoscientific twaddle. I avoid the HuffPo like the plague. But, like a moth to the flame, sometimes I can’t help myself, and when a facebook friend (and former blogger) pointed to this contrarian article, my interest was piqued and I had to check it out.
Is High Blood Pressure Overtreated? Dr. Dennis Gottfried, Associate professor, University of Connecticut Medical School
First of all, I don’t know Dr Gottfried, and I don’t want to cast aspersions on him professionally. He might be a faith healer and snake-handler, or he might be a prominent researcher and expert in the field. I have no idea, and other than his questionable judgement in being affiliated with the HuffPo, I don’t want to make any judgement on him as a physician or a scientist. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Movin' Meat*
April 7th, 2011 by Davis Liu, M.D. in Health Policy, Opinion
Tags: Atul Gawande, Colonoscopy, Dr. Oz, Gastroenterology, Healthcare Costs, Medical Record Review, Medical Records, Overtreatment, PCP, Primary Care, Primary Care Physicians, Shannon Brownlee, Specialists
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There are many tips to saving money on medical costs like asking your doctor only for generic medications, choosing an insurance plan with a high deductible and lower monthly premiums, going to an urgent care or retail clinic rather than the emergency room, and getting prescriptions mailed rather than go to a pharmacy.
How about getting your old medical records and having them reviewed by a primary care doctor? It might save you from having an unnecessary test or procedure performed.
Research shows that there is tremendous variability in what doctors do. Shannon Brownlee’s excellent book, Overtreated – Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, provides great background on this as well as work done by the Dr. Jack Wennberg and colleagues on the Dartmouth Atlas. Some have argued that because of the fee for service structure, the more doctors do the more they get paid. This drives health care costs upwards significantly. Dr. Atul Gawande noted this phenomenon when comparing two cities in Texas, El Paso and McAllen in the June 2009 New Yorker piece. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Saving Money and Surviving the Healthcare Crisis*
April 7th, 2011 by Toni Brayer, M.D. in Health Policy, Opinion
Tags: AARP, CMS, Costs, Entitlement Reform, GOP, Healthcare reform, medicaid, Medicare, Path To Prosperity, States
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I am all for any proposal that will improve heath care in America. Improvement means controlling costs, covering all Americans so no one has to worry about going bankrupt to pay for health care. Improvement means access to quality care without having to worry about losing your job, which means losing your coverage. Improvement means a system where all incentives are aligned to prevent disease, rather than using expensive technologies and hospitals to treat disease after the fact. Any proposal that gets us there has my vote.
In the GOP “Path to Prosperity” budget for 2012, they propose a few things that are good and a few big things that are bad…really really bad. First the good. Capping the medical malpractice lawsuits for “pain and suffering” would be a huge step forward. Patients should be compensated for medical errors but the “hit the lottery” windfalls for pain and suffering are costly drivers that make no sense. There is no place in the world, besides the USA, that has such onerous medical malpractice lawsuits. And they drive up cost for everyone. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at EverythingHealth*
April 6th, 2011 by DrRich in Health Policy, Humor, Opinion
Tags: American College of Surgeons, Healthcare reform, Law Suits, Medical Malpractice, Medical Tourism, Obamacare, Orthopedic Surgery, Plastic Surgery, Surgery
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In an earlier post, DrRich offered several potential strategies for doctors and patients to consider should healthcare reformers ultimately succeed in their efforts to make it illegal for Americans to seek medical care outside the auspices of Obamacare. To those readers who persist in thinking that DrRich is particularly paranoid in worrying about such a thing, he refers you to his prior work carefully documenting the efforts the Central Authority has already made in limiting the prerogatives of individual Americans within the healthcare system, and reminds you that in any society where social justice is the overriding concern, individual prerogatives such as these must be criminalized. Indeed, whether individuals will retain the right to spend their own money on their own healthcare is ultimately the real battle. The outcome of this battle will determine much more than merely what kind of healthcare system we will end up with.
DrRich, despite his paranoia on the matter, is a long-term optimist, and believes that the American spirit will ultimately prevail. So, to advance this happy result DrRich (in the previously mentioned post) graciously offered several creative options that could be employed to establish a useful Black Market in healthcare, which will allow individuals to exercise their healthcare-autonomy against the day when such autonomy again becomes legal. His suggestions included offshore, state-of-the-art medical centers on old aircraft carriers; combination Casino/Hospitals on the sovereign soil of Native American reservations; and cutting-edge medical centers just south of the border (which would have the the added benefit of encouraging our government to finally close the borders to illegal crossings once and for all).
As entertaining as it might be to imagine such solutions, a readily available, though much more mundane, option exists today, which is to say, medical tourism. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Covert Rationing Blog*
