Easy. Quick. Convenient. Cheap. These are great characteristics of products and services Americans desire. But when it comes to health care, we need to add two other attributes: common sense and moderation. Just consider what we’re learning about excess reliance on two disparate items: over-the-counter heartburn medications and a ubiquitous health measure known as the….
Continue ReadingArchives for February 2016
MDs get it wrong on medical malpractice, surgeon training
After four years of undergraduate education, four years of medical school, and then internships and residencies for several years after, doctors should be a well-informed lot, right? But they can get themselves into some downright dumb stuff. This includes their wrong thinking about the prevalence of medical malpractice litigation, and their head-scratching revisiting of a….
Continue ReadingCatching up on developments posted on the blog
Some quick updates on stories I have been following: SENTENCING FOR DEADLY PAIN-MEDS DOC: An Orange County, CA., physician has been sentenced to 30 years to life imprisonment. She was convicted of murder for her reckless, negligent dispensing of prescriptions for powerful pain killers that killed three. Experts continue to argue whether prosecutors went too….
Continue ReadingGood ideas abound for curbing patient harms; they just need to be shared
What does it take to make hospitals safer so patients aren’t harmed? Big stuff and small, some of it surprising─and all of it mattering a lot. For instance: Getting caregivers to wash their hands. It’s the top cause of debilitating and sometimes deadly hospital-acquired infections. Some institutions empower nurses to police and remind dirty doctors;….
Continue ReadingPressing U.S. mental health needs get some major, welcome attention
Americans spend almost $23 billion for mental health care, and lost productivity from mental illness costs the nation almost as many billions of dollars at the workplace. It has become such a significant health care concern that an influential health care advisory body has stepped up its advice to all physicians in the United States….
Continue ReadingRationed care? MDs, hospitals say drug shortages are causing it
When partisans want to terrify Americans about their access to health care, they use a code term: rationed care. It turns out that doctors and hospitals nationwide already have made that frightening prospect real: They tell the New York Times that drug shortages have forced them to make tough choices about limiting which patients get optimal….
Continue ReadingIn Michigan, a troubling case involving medical expert testimony
In protecting its citizens, Michigan already is taking a deserved drubbing for its shameful government negligence in allowing the lead pollution of Flint‘s drinking water. Officials now need to get their act together to stop a different kind of public policy embarrassment: Expert medical witnesses who abandon any pretext of objectivity and instead work hard….
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