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How Do You Explain The Popularity Of TV’s Dr. House?


Would YOU as the patient see a doctor who is a well-known jerk, abuses drugs, gives the wrong diagnosis more often than not, and is known to like ordering very invasive tests??? Be honest…

The other week, a patient with a chronic cough exclaimed to me that she wished the fictional character Dr. House of TV fame actually existed in real life, because he was somebody who can diagnose anything.

I looked her straight in the eye and told her that somebody like Dr. House in the real world would be a physician nobody would want to see for many reasons:

  1. In the real world, patients expect doctors to have the correct diagnosis from the beginning (might forgive one wrong diagnosis). Dr. House seems to always get things wrong multiple times before he gets it right. I seriously doubt most patients would have stuck around as long as they do on the TV shows before going elsewhere. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Fauquier ENT Blog*

Physicians Search For Best Treatment Plan Based On Outcomes Of Similar Patients In Hospital Records System, Not Medical Literature

Wow. Todd Park, Chief Technical Officer at HHS, ought to be jumping out of his skin with joy at this one.

This time, House, M.D. fans, it was lupus. The article “Evidence-Based Medicine in the EMR Era” published in the Nov. 10 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine might have read like a House television script, but it was a real-life glimpse of what the most optimistic health IT advocates are hoping will become commonplace in U.S. health care: Mining EHR data to arrive at treatment decisions.

In a Health IT Exchange piece (on TechTarget) EHR data spurs real-time evidence-based medicine, Don Fluckinger summarizes (and dramatizes, accurately) this early specimen of care being transformed – beyond the literature – by looking at past records. Faced with a 13 year old lupus patient with a complex problem (see article for details)…

In four hours, they did a retrospective study of similar patients in the hospital’s data warehouse…, and decided to move ahead with the treatment based on the previous results of 98 [similar patients] … The authors said they will never know if they made the “correct” decision, but they did know that — in absence of randomized trial research to support their decision — they acted on the evidence of the best data available, coupled with their experience.

“Our case is but one example of a situation in which the existing literature is insufficient to guide the clinical care of a patient,” the authors wrote. …

What are we waiting for, people??  Imagine if Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at e-Patients.net*

Another Fake Plastic Surgeon Victim Surfaces

We posted previously on Oneal Ron Morris, a transsexual charlatan who has been injecting clients with his own home brew of filler agents resulting in disastrous consequences. A victim of his facial services has surfaced:

lumps and bumps

The lumpy cheeks, misshapen chin and ballooning upper lip are still visible on Rajee Narinesingh’s face; more than two years after she says she received a backroom cosmetic procedure from a man police say performed numerous, botched, unlicensed procedures. “I had to end up going to surgery, to get me even to this point,” Narinesingh told CBS4′s Gary Nelson Monday, pointing to the disfigurement she still is trying to have reversed. Narinesingh is among multiple alleged victims of Oneal Ron Morris, a transsexual who is alleged to have performed cosmetic procedures in homes and apartments.

Source: miami.cbslocal.com/2011/11/28/new-victim-reveals-fake-docs-alleged-work/

Rajee Narinesingh apparently met Oneal Ron Morris via referral in the transsexual community. She Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Truth in Cosmetic Surgery*

Reducing Health Care Spending: When Rationing Resources Goes Too Far

A sure-to-be controversial article appears in the Chicago Tribune earlier this asking the sensitive question of ‘Health care at any age, any cost?:’

“If you want to save all lives, you’re in trouble,” said Callahan, co-founder of The Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute in New York, and a faculty member at Harvard Medical School, in an interview. “And if you want to save all lives at any cost, you’re really in trouble.”

Callahan and co-author Nuland, a retired professor of surgery at Yale School of Medicine who wrote the best-selling “How We Die,” were both 80 when the article was published.

“We need to stop thinking of medicine as an all-out war against death, because death always wins,” said Callahan.

The article goes on the make some bold demands of doctors: Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Wes*

Study Explores New Method Of Fluorescing Cancer Cells In Tumors

00299er743jf73u Two months ago we reported on the first ovarian cancer surgeries performed with fluorescence guidance. As described in the Nature Medicine paper, the international team of researchers from The Netherlands, Germany, and Indiana used folate coupled to fluorescein isothiocyanate (FITC) to make ovarian cancer cells glow so they could be easily identified.

Now, in this week’s issue of Science Translational Medicine, another international team from Japan and Maryland reports their development of a spray-on probe that may provide even better sensitivity and fluorescent contrast than the folate-FITC counterpart. The editors of STM summarize this work well in the following note: Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*

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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