My blog represents my personal experiences and perspectives. This includes many anecdotes from my life and from my medical practice. I have been scrupulous to anonymize all medical anecdotes and to avoid ever belittling or making fun of patients. (I often make fun of and criticize myself, my colleagues, and the institutions where I have worked.)
Anne came in for her annual health maintenance visit with great news. Her irritable bowel syndrome was no longer a problem. “I hope you aren’t upset with me, but I’m cured.”
I miss the relative simplicity and patient-centeredness that characterized the early years of my medical career.
Decades of behavioral economics research and management science predict that framing quality of medical care as something that can be captured effectively by a simple metric, and then incentivized by financial rewards or punishment based on that metric, would misfire.
I find it disheartening that those who push for QI and P4P programs based on evidence do not understand the most basic principles of the scientific method.
Patient-centered shared decision-making is one of the toughest tasks in clinical medicine. It involves a collaborative effort to collect and assess evidence, leavened with clinician experience, and framed within the context and values of the individual patient.
The world of medicine is quite properly focused on finding and applying the best available evidence to processes of care. Unfortunately, too often this results in the use of inappropriate hard targets and mis-applied guidelines.
Dear Universe.
Happy Thanksgiving. I am truly thankful, and here is a partial list of my reasons:
1. I won the lottery. No, not the one at the corner store. I mean being born at this time in history in the US and to parents who cared deeply about their children and the future and had the wherewithal to give me a good start.
2. My health. As a physician for the last 35 years, I am all too well aware of how tragic and undeserved ill-health can be.
The deluge of clinical information I face every day is littered with clinical junk mail.
All day long I work with patients who want answers and certainty. My awareness of how few questions have proven answers, and how unpredictable human health and disease can be, is a heavy burden. This discordance may be why I enjoyed Stuart Firestein’s excellent book, Ignorance, so much.
I did my family practice residency in a Catholic hospital in the mid west. The strong presence of nuns in leadership and the quiet influence of the attached order and Catholic school lent an unmistakably religious atmosphere to the hospital. Mostly, as residents, we were too busy and too tired to either notice or care, but occasionally the interface between the hospital’s spiritual context and the world of patient care was uncomfortable. Even jarring.