We all know about “doctor time.” No matter how hard I try, the clock seems to out sprint me. Morning rounds in the hospital go longer than expected, a colleague stops you with a question, a son forgot his lunch, or something else. The list is long.
In fact, as a very well-educated patient, it seems that the doctors I choose for myself and family are even later than I. It seems that most good doctors have long waits. A coincidence?
However accepted “doctor time” is in the office or hospital, it doesn’t work the same in the bike racing world. In the land of genetically endowed androids, the clock waits for no one in particular. It turns out that our pizza-sponsored team has a few doctors who run on “doctor time” in real life. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Dr John M*
I don’t know about the rest of you medical bloggers, but I’ve been getting emails from folks who run a website called DrugWatch.com asking for reciprocal links and promoting themselves as the go-to place for patients to get up-to-date information on medication safety.
Tucked into the website is this promise: “We will never accept advertising from the pharmaceutical industry.” Right. Because the whole site is a front for a bunch of Orlando lawyers trying to sniff out potential clients for medication-related lawsuits against the pharmaceutical industry. Read more »
A German physician wrote me about this, so while CNN may have an international reach, it’s not always with an adoring audience.
The physician was reacting to the weekend “Paging Dr. Gupta” program, which Dr. Gupta referred to once as “SG, MD.” The first thing that struck me was his introduction, in which he said:
“I’m your doctor. I’m also your coach.”
Later in the program he said:
“Think of this as your appointment. No waiting. No insurance necessary.”
I find this very troubling. He’s not my doctor. He’s not my coach. When I watch a “news” program, it’s NOT my medical appointment. It’s supposed to be news, not medical advice.
But that’s not what the German physician wrote to me about, so I kept watching (the segment in question appears about 5 minutes and 30 seconds deep, and after the 30-second commercial you have to watch to get there):
Gupta reacted to a viewer’s message on Twitter in which the tweep asked: “Does anyone know a ‘miracle’ treatment for ovarian cancer?” Read more »
Four-year-old Devan Tatlow’s struggle with leukemia has caused quite a stir on the Internet, prompting celebs like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian to encourage people to donate their bone marrow. Dr. Jon LaPook talks with Devan’s family about their search for a match.
Imagine throwing a lifesaving treatment in the garbage. That’s exactly what happens in the United States over ten thousand times a day because we do not routinely offer to collect precious umbilical cord blood at the time of birth. Thousands of Americans — many of them children — needlessly die annually because they cannot find either a bone marrow or umbilical cord blood match to help treat conditions like lymphoma and leukemia. Yet umbilical blood is discarded as medical waste in the vast majority of the more than four million births occurring each year. Read more »
Why do we physicians chart the way we do? Hopefully, we do it perfectly well and have no concerns at all. But where I practice emergency medicine, we are approaching maximum inefficiency in charting.
It all became much clearer when we started using our new EMR system. Let me make it clear, I’m not against EMR. In fact, typing and templates work better for me than dictating. My dictations were usually a mine field of blanks and misunderstood words.
Furthermore, if I wanted to use it, we have a new voice recognition dictation system in addition to our templated chart. Though admittedly, the voice recognition program clearly hates some of my partners, as evidenced by the way they grasp the screen and yell at it (‘Chest Pain, not west rain!’) and by its inexplicable use of profanity in the occasional chart.
But I digress. The problem as I see it is the evolution of the medical record. Why does the medical record exist? Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at edwinleap.com*
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I don’t know about the rest of you medical bloggers, but I’ve been getting emails from folks who run a website called DrugWatch.com asking for reciprocal links and promoting themselves as the go-to place for patients to get up-to-date information on medication safety.
