Better Health: Smart Health Commentary Better Health (TM): smart health commentary

Latest Posts

A Man Is Not Equal To The Sum Of His Medicine Problems

I believe that those controlling the purse strings are steering modern medicine towards the practice of seeing patients more as the sum of their medical problems than as individual people. Patients have become streams of data as opposed to real human lives.

Consider the dynamics of a family: a wife may worry about her husband while their child adores a father she instinctively knows to be irreplaceable. Modern medicine, however, may only see a diabetic with hypertension and a cholesterol-level running too high. The computers programmed for those advocating the power of data to revolutionize medicine would boil this man down to his “meaningful” essence — numbers, for the above imaginary man: 250.00, 401.0, and 272.0. Read more »

Using ICD-9 Codes To Describe Your Morning

PLACE OF OCCURRENCE, HOME ICD-E849.0

6:00 AM

Alarm goes off.  Hit snooze button. CIRCADIAN RHYTHM SLEEP D/O IRREG SLEEPWAKE TYPE ICD-327.33

6:30

  • Alarm goes off for third time.  Ready to hit snooze button, but knee in ribs from wife prevents more snooze button procrastination.  CONTUSION OF CHEST WALL ICD-922.1, ADULT MALTREATMENT UNSPECIFIED NEC ICD-995.8
  • Feeling tired, go to make a pot of coffee. CAFFEINE ADDICTION ICD-304.40
  • Fill bowl with Lucky Charms and start eating. UNSPECIFIED NUTRITIONAL DEFICIENCY ICD-269.9, HYPERGLYCEMIA ICD-790.29

6:45

  • Realize that coffee pot needs to be turned on for it to make coffee. ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER, ADULT ICD-314.00, LISTLESSNESS ICD-780.79
  • 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…

Read more »

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…

Read more »

See all interviews »

Latest Cartoon

See all cartoons »

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…

Read more »

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…

Read more »

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…

Read more »

See all book reviews »

Commented - Most Popular Articles