The case of Jahi McMath is incredibly sad. She is the 13-year-old girl in Oakland, CA who had tonsil/adenoid surgery to treat sleep apnea. Her throat began bleeding profusely hours after the surgery. This ultimately led to her being placed on a ventilator, experiencing period of low oxygen in her blood...
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A colleague read my post on President Bush’s stent and thought it might be a good idea to describe the potential harms of a stent. He is a wise man, and his name is Larry Bauer, PhD. He is the CEO of the Northeast Family Medicine Education Consortium. Both he and...
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Earlier this year, former President George W Bush had a stent procedure on his heart. A model of physical fitness who rode 30 miles in the heat on a bike ride for veterans, he had a series of tests that led to him undergoing the procedure in one heart vessel. This...
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I’m re-posting a piece I wrote 3 years ago. It still applies today. I realize I’ve griped a lot in my previous posts, though I don’t see myself as a nattering nabob of negativism. For problems to be fixed they first must be identified, and our healthcare system has lots of...
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The American Heart Association/American College of Cardiology just published new guidelines for screening and treating cholesterol. In some ways these guidelines are more like the British guidelines. Instead of setting up doctors and patients to fail by calling for certain cholesterol number targets as in the old U.S. guidelines (LDL level...
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Yet another study has documented the obvious: that the Medicare fee schedule is heavily weighted to favor procedural services. Sinsky and Dugdale added to the previous documentation of this institutional bigotry by being sure to capture the other demands on physician time besides the procedure itself. This includes time spent talking...
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To finish out my complaining about Dr. Oz for this cycle, I want to go back to the New Yorker article on him that appeared earlier this year. A quote from the article: “As Oz likes to say, Marcus Welby—the kindly, accessible, but straight-talking television doctor—is dead.” Assuming he really said...
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I’m back to my usual comments after my long series on the many ways family physicians deliver better care at a lower cost. When our article came out that I’ve been commenting on, I was in the middle of griping about Dr. Oz again. I’ll pick up where I left off....
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Continuing my discussion of the findings in our recently published study on the ways family physicians deliver better care at a lower cost than a multi-ologist model, today I will talk about how family physicians deliver care at lower cost facilities. I think I’ll make this post on the cost-effectiveness of...
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Continuing my discussion of the findings in our recently published study on the ways family physicians deliver better care at a lower cost than a multi-ologist model, today I will talk about how family physicians actually talk their patients out of expensive wasteful tests and treatments. I saw this occur multiple...
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