In my inbox today there was a graphic from NEJM Catalyst indicating that individual doctors are a whole lot more responsible for addressing the obesity epidemic than private companies.
More than General Mills, Ocean Spray, Coke and Pepsi???
September 17, 2018
When I grow up, I’ll be a worse GP | Pulse Today
Swedish and British humor are fairly similar. That’s why I always enjoyed British sitcoms, back when I lived in Sweden and on PBS when I had a TV (stopped when they went digital, ten or fifteen years ago).
This entertaining piece was on the British GP website Pulse:
“At the age of 37, I contrive to look like a sensible professional to those who don’t know me. But I am not. I cannot adult. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to. And the more I meet people older than me, the more I realise they are no more wise or together than I am, but are simply bemused adolescents trapped in the body of a grown-up.
I may never master adulting. But do you know what? I am proud. I am proud I frequently make stupid mistakes and laugh at them, and I choose my friends because they do the same. I think I am a more human and relatable GP for it.”
http://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/views/dr-zoe-norris/when-i-grow-up-ill-be-a-worse-gp/20037427.article
September 15, 2018
Love in Medicine
Many physician bloggers do a lot of kvetching about the bureaucratic aspects of Medicine. I found one on KevinMD who seems to have a nobler purpose:
“Science as we know it today is a tool that we use in medicine, and how we use it and apply it can vary depending on whether we have love as our foundation or not. A medicine that is founded upon love, will use science responsibly for the benefit of all mankind and never could it allow its misuse for purely personal gain, and financial agendas as we often see today in the pharmaceutical business for example.”
http://thesoulfuldoctor.co.uk/blog/the-foundation-of-medicine-is-love/
July 10, 2018
“Work For Us and Have No Say”
A promoted post keeps appearing in my LinkedIn feed. At first I just ignored it, but tonight I looked at it for a minute and thought to myself: What kind of doctor in today’s climate of time pressures and professional burnout wants to sign up for a job where you are told, “you see the patients and we’ll take care of everything else, including HOW you take care of your patients”?
I would think effective job ads for physicians today would say something like, “come work with us and we’ll value your input into everything our organization does”.
Anyway, I might have a spot for a well qualified family doc of the latter inclination.
July 7, 2018
Don’t Tell Me Doctor Salaries are Driving Healthcare Costs
The second major healthcare blog that reblogged some of my posts, after KevinMD, was The Healthcare Blog. I’m still appearing on both. And while I sometimes enjoy them very much, I don’t always agree with the posts I read on either one of those blogs.
Today I watched a video post by Matthew Holt, the founder of THCB. He is a master of brief, snappy commentary in video format, but this one bothered me a little. He implied, in a talk recorded in Finland, that the cause of high healthcare costs in the United States is that doctors want a Mercedes and a five bedroom house. I think that’s small potatoes compared to healthcare executives’ and healthcare investors’ eight figure payouts, which are enough to pay for jets and yachts:
http://thehealthcareblog.com/blog/2018/07/06/the-past-present-and-future-of-health-care/
October 6, 2016
Is Infertility Hereditary?
I have, in my entire life, made up only one joke worthy of standup comedy. It is perhaps similar to Stephen Wright’s “I live on a one-way, dead end street”.
It goes “Is infertility hereditary?”
Of course, there is some serious thought behind it. More serious than I thought, it turns out:
Sons born with fertility treatment ‘inherit problems’
Boys born to fathers who needed help conceiving grow up to have poorer sperm quality than peers conceived without help, a study has found.
April 23, 2016
Top 100
A Country Doctor Writes is one of the top 100 healthcare blogs on eVisit’s 2016 list. They write:
This blog is a great read from a small-town doctor who’s been practicing on the same families for generations. The posts feature “progress notes,” highlighting interesting and unusual cases, along with touching stories of being the doctor for such a close-knit community.
April 10, 2015
A Crazy Old-School Physician
A post by Suneel Dhand on KevinMD asks the question who is crazy – the elderly physician who knows his patient’s history by heart, or today’s young doctors, who know the computer better than their patients:
Then there’s the reality that his generation represents exactly what a personal physician should be. A solid physician with great clinical skills and highly respected by both the patient and their family. Unlike what medicine has become today, this was a doctor who would look you in the eye and think carefully and thoroughly through the diagnosis and treatment plan. It was obvious when he spoke to me that his clinical reasoning skills were top-notch. He wasn’t a doctor who was glued to his computer screen, having to spend the majority of his day clicking and typing away — about as far away as possible from the “type and click bot” doctor that is proliferating at today’s medical front lines.
http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2015/04/the-old-school-physician-is-who-we-should-aspire-to-be.html
February 8, 2015
The Difference Between Care and Cure
My wife ordered a book a few weeks ago by Henri Nouwen, called “Bread for the Journey”. It was published posthumously and contains daily reflections. Nouwen is perhaps best known for his writings about the “wounded healer”. This morning over coffee, Emma asked me to look at today’s reflection, titled “Care, the Source of All Cure”:
“Care is something other than cure. Cure means “change.” A doctor, a lawyer, a minister, a social worker-they all want to use their professional skills to bring about changes in people’s lives. They get paid for whatever kind of cure they can bring about. But cure, desirable as it may be, can easily become violent, manipulative, and even destructive if it does not grow out of care. Care is being with, crying out with, suffering with, feeling with. Care is compassion. It is claiming the truth that the other person is my brother or sister, human, mortal, vulnerable, like I am.
When care is our first concern, cure can be received as a gift. Often we are not able to cure, but we are always able to care. To care is to be human.”
December 24, 2014
What Will the Doctor Do?
In the near future, doctors will be the link between the science and humanity of medicine. They will listen and guide, while computers do the diagnosing…
Oncologist James Salwitz writes about the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan in a nice piece on The Health Care Blog:
“The doctor will no longer be the final fountain of health knowledge. The doctor will no longer propose or possibly even make diagnoses. The doctor will no longer design or recommend treatment. For all of these functions, for which we turn to the physician today, we will turn to the Health IT computer.
What will the doctor do? Serve as health manager as well as an input and output device; the vital link between silicon software and carbon wetware. The physician’s role will include not only understanding human beings, but also advanced computer systems.”
http://thehealthcareblog.com/blog/2014/12/22/grading-the-federal-health-it-strategic-plan/?
A Country Doctor Reads: 