Some universities have more cachet than others. On the West Coast it’s Stanford that has the reputation as the best. Then there’s Oxford, Yale, and MIT. I would wager that in most people’s minds the creme de la creme is Harvard, where you find the best of the best. If Harvard is involved, a project gains an extra gobbet of credibility. Brigham and Women’s Hospital also has similar reputation in U.S. as one the hospitals associated with only Harvard and the New England Journalof Medicine (NEJM) — premier university, premier hospital, premier journal.
So if Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital are offering continuing medical education (CME) for acupuncture, there must be something to it, right? A course called “Structural Acupuncture for Physicians” must have some validity. Read more »
Hospitals are using twitter and billboards to broadcast emergency department waiting room times. This is not without risk, as billboards may not clarify the triage process, where seriously-ill patients will be seen right away.
Recent articles from NEJM and JAMA articles on medical students and social media.
A lot of the developments in openness in peer review and the world of grant funding are chronicled at Nature’s Peer-to-Peer blog. Bora Zivkovic has been and active an articulate defender of open publications as well.
Washington, DC, physician Katherine Chretian gives her take on the issue in a recent USA Today op-ed. She is an expert of the Facebook-medicine intersection, having authored a JAMA study on the issue.
She says, no, doctors should not be friending their patients:
Having a so-called dual relationship with a patient — that is, a financial, social or professional relationship in addition to the therapeutic relationship — can lead to serious ethical issues and potentially impair professional judgment. We need professional boundaries to do our job well.
Furthermore, there’s the little matter of patient privacy and HIPAA. I wasn’t aware of this, but simply becoming Facebook friends with patients can infringe upon uncertain ground. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at KevinMD.com*
Medical malpractice is a major issue that divides doctors and lawyers — with patients often left in the middle. I wrote last year in USA Today that reform is sorely needed, mainly to help injured patients be compensated more quickly and fairly than they currently are:
Researchers from the New England Journal of Medicine found that nearly one in six cases involving patients injured from medical errors received no payment. For patients who did receive compensation, they waited an average of five years before their case was decided, with one-third of claims requiring six years or more to resolve. These are long waits for patients and their families, who are forced to endure the uncertainty of whether they will be compensated or not.
And with 54 cents of every dollar injured patients receive used to pay legal and administrative fees, the overhead costs clearly do not justify this level of inefficiency.
In this video excerpt from The Vanishing Oath, a film directed by Ryan Flesher, M.D., perspectives from both sides are given, and it’s easy to see why this contentious issue isn’t going to be resolved anytime soon:
*This blog post was originally published at KevinMD.com*
Much has been recently made about the bureaucratic obstacles that primary care doctors face. With good reason. The impetus was a recent New England Journal of Medicine paper from Richard J. Baron that I mentioned recently.
The New York Times’ Pauline Chen interviewed Dr. Baron, who shared some interesting insights on what needs to be done. He contrasts the inertia in primary care to drug manufacturing.
If you took the resources that went into drug development, for instance, “and put them into a program like this that achieves meaningful levels of behavior change, a lot more patients could be better off.” In other words, research into new primary care models isn’t taking off because the money isn’t there.
But Dr. Baron also notes that money isn’t everything, since “primary care practitioners have been saying that we either already do or would do certain things if you paid us more. It’s true that you can’t do things consistently, reliably and across scales without additional payment. But payment is not enough. People have to change what they are thinking about when they go to work.” Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at KevinMD.com*
Latest Tweets from @DrVal
Could not authenticate you.
Better Health Audio
Featured Audio
Healthy VisionTM with Dr. Val: Safe Contact Lens Wear and Care
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
