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Diabetes, Jet Lag, And Adjusting To The 24-Hour Clock

I traveled by small, wooden plane.  The flight from Boston to London took just over six hours.  The time change was five hours ahead of Boston, so when we landed at 6 pm, I was only ready for lunch.  The trek from London to Dubai was almost seven hours, pushing the clock ahead a full nine hours from Boston, making my head hurt because how was it Wednesday morning when I was still on Tuesday’s timetable?

(I wrote about the impact of changing time zones for an Animas column last month, but I seriously had no idea what I was in for when I decided to take the trip to Dubai.)

That first day there, the Wednesday, everyone gave me the same advice:  “Don’t go to sleep.”  (It felt like A Nightmare on Elm Street.)  “Work through the exhaustion and just go to bed on Wednesday night on Dubai time, and you should be good the next day.”

For the first few hours after landing, Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Six Until Me.*

Giving People Across The World The Best Medical Care They Can Get

Guatemala is a developing country, with great natural beauty, hard-working people and many challenges.  Most Americans look at places like Guatemala and see only the challenges.  Some see opportunity.

I’ve just returned from Guatemala, where I met with our business partners, government officials, and others.   And I can tell you a universal truth.  People across the world want the best medical care they can get.  They aren’t looking for the latest technologies and drugs and treatments – or, rather, they aren’t looking only for those things.  No, what is most important to whoever I meet, no matter where they live, is that they are able to get the right diagnosis, and the right treatment.

It’s a harder thing to get in some places than in others.  Americans don’t realize that Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at BestDoctors.com: See First Blog*

Old Nursing School Photograph Portrays A Different Time In The Profession

I love old nursing photographs. Some of them are works of art. This photo from 1933 is an excellent example. The ladies posing in this photo are graduates of the Providence Hospital School of Nursing, Oakland, California. This striking photo chronicles the history of the nursing profession. These women were the original Angels of Mercy of the 20th Century.

It was a time of innocents, but even then, you had to be tough to make it as a nurse. It was a dismal time for nurses, and the beginning of the nursing shortage. According to a letter written by the ANA, through its Executive Committee and sent to hospital directors around the country back in 1933, nurses faced many challenges. There was an over abundance of nurses in the early 1930s. That meant that Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Nurse Ratched's Place*

Expert Shows Concern: Is It Possible To Choose The Best Health Care For You?

This interview is the ninth and final of a series of brief chats between CFAH president and founder, Jessie Gruman, and experts—our CFAH William Ziff Fellows—who have devoted their careers to understanding and encouraging people’s engagement in their health and health care.

Trudy Lieberman is concerned that despite all the rhetoric, choosing the best hospital, the best doctor, the best health plan, is simply not possible.  Some of the so-called best might be good for some people but not others, and the information available to inform/guide choices is just too ambiguous.

Ms. Lieberman is a CFAH William Ziff Fellow.

horizontalline

Gruman: What has changed in the past year that has influenced people’s engagement in their health and health care?

Lieberman: Costs have risen a lot, and employers and insurers have made consumers pay higher deductibles, co-pays and coinsurance.  The theory is, Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Prepared Patient Forum: What It Takes Blog*

Challenges And Opportunities Of Health Care Social Media

I spoke on health care social media and regulatory compliance at the Health Care Compliance Association’s New England Regional Annual Conference last week.  As you may expect, the room was full of the folks who, generally speaking, are the folks who block social media sites on health care organization networks.  I sent a link to an online bio to one of the session organizers in advance, and even that site was blocked by his facility’s network.  Clearly, we have a long way to go in educating health care compliance professionals about the risks and benefits of using health care social media, and an appropriate approach to balancing these risks and benefits so as to establish an appropriate social media presence for each health care organization.

My talk was followed by a presentation by two federal prosecutors, one of whom reminded the audience that they may need to produce copies of all online postings in response to government document requests or subpoenas.  We may quibble about the scope of material that might be covered by such a production request, but the key takeaway from this comment should be Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at HealthBlawg :: David Harlow's Health Care Law Blog*

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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