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Saying No To Patients Can Make Doctors Very Unpopular

January 13th, 2010 by Edwin Leap, M.D. in Better Health Network, Opinion
1 Comment »

This is my column in EM News for the month of January.  Sometimes, being a physician means saying no and being disliked.  It’s not a popularity contest!  It’s about doing the right thing.

Most of us went into medicine because, in addition to being good students, we wanted to help people. How many oceans of ink and forests of paper have been used explaining that point to admissions committees we’ll never know. Suffice it to say, it felt very good when our professors wrote us glowing letters of recommendation. Of course, we were also saying, “I want to feel good about helping people. I want the recognition associated with the act of helping!” Premedical students, medical students, and physicians tend to be those people who desire accolades and who are naturally well-suited to attaining them. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at edwinleap.com*

Just To Be Sure: The Most Expensive Phrase In Medicine

November 6th, 2009 by GruntDoc in Better Health Network, Opinion
1 Comment »

Kevin, MD linked to this, and I really must comment.

Here’s the abstract, and I hope you’ll read it all:

For years I’ve heard friends describe experiences of being caught in a web of excessive and unnecessary medical testing. Their doctors ordered test Z to investigate a seemingly incidental finding on test Y, which had come about because of a borderline abnormality on test X.

I often wondered why test X was done in the first place. As a primary care physician, I would have treated them for the likely diagnosis and done diagnostic tests — especially a series of diagnostic tests — only if they didn’t respond as expected…. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at GruntDoc*