The first step in making sure you have a qualified primary care doctor is to check the doctor’s board certification credentials. Tragically, Michael Jackson must not have done that, and it may have played a role in his fatal cardiac arrest. The pop singer had a non-board-certified cardiologist right on hand when he collapsed, but….
Continue ReadingArchives for June 2009
Quality Care at the Medical “Home”
There’s a new/old take on the importance of primary care doctors to obtaining the best quality medical care. It’s called the medical home, and it doesn’t mean house calls, but it does mean that the patient has a medical “home” — a team of providers, led by a primary care doctor, who coordinate the patient’s….
Continue ReadingMore Evidence for a Good Health Habit: Reading Your Medical Record
Evidence continues to pile up for why patients need to read their own medical records. A new study finds it is distressingly common for primary care practices, especially big ones, to fail to inform patients about abnormal test results. The study was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine and was reported by Nicholas Bakalar….
Continue ReadingReading What Your Doctor Writes About You
Medicine continues to take small but encouraging steps to move out of the 19th century in communications with patients. The latest: an experiment at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital to let patients read on a secure website the notes that doctors write about them at the end of each visit. As reported in the Boston….
Continue ReadingWho Pays for Medical Mistakes?
Several thought-provoking letters to the editor in the New York Times address this issue in the context of the current health care reform battle. One of the letters is from Patrick Malone and says: To the Editor: The reason malpractice is expensive and burdensome is not any unfairness in the system, but because too many….
Continue ReadingThe Role of Lawsuits in Enforcing Patient Safety
Patrick Malone had a recent blog post on the Huffington Post that discusses the “medical hit-and-run” — preventable injuries that happen to patients where the doctors and nurses pretend nothing happened. The comments below his blog post are interesting. All responsible attorneys would like nothing better than to reduce the number of lawsuits that have….
Continue ReadingMelding Safety with Affordability in American Health Care
More and more doctors and patients are recognizing the link between affordability of medical care and safety. One problem that plagues fee-for-service medicine is that doctors are rewarded financially for ordering excessive tests and treatments, which are both dangerous and wasteful. Geoff Berg, an internist in Rhode Island, put it this way in a letter….
Continue ReadingToo Much Medical Care Is Dangerous and Expensive
A New Yorker article by Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon, focused on why McAllen, Texas has higher medical costs than just about anywhere in the country. Dr. Gawande concluded that much of the problem could be traced to the very aggressive, intervention-oriented style of medicine practiced there — all stemming from the fee-for-service payment system….
Continue ReadingSome Antidepressants Suspected to Increase Breast Cancer Recurrence Rate
At the annual conference of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, scientists presented a new study that found certain antidepressants may interfere with the effectiveness of tamoxifen, a drug commonly taken by breast cancer survivors to keep the cancer from coming back, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution article. Tamoxifen has been used for decades to….
Continue ReadingTest for Early Detection of Ovarian Cancer Relapse Doesn’t Help Prolong Life
The received wisdom of cancer treatment in the United States is that early detection and early treatment save lives. But this is not always true with some types of cancer. Sometimes the early detection of a cancer just means the patient lives longer with the knowledge of having cancer, but their life span is the….
Continue Reading