Posts from the ‘History of Medicine’ Category
- Post-Hospital Syndrome on June 14, 2014
- Doomed to Repeat on July 18, 2013
- All Educated Up and No Place To Go on July 12, 2013
- Second Chances on June 5, 2013
- A Book Excerpt on May 15, 2013
medicine for real- The End of EmpathyNew word of the day: Tele-empathy. Tele-empathy is not being empathetic over the phone. It is not crying in the sad parts of your favorite TV show. It is not beaming empathetic thoughts magically across time and space. No, tele-empathy is a technology. I should rather say, a group of technologies recently being created to […]
- Right To TryI haven’t posted on this blog for quite some time, having gotten distracted by the tempting and ultimately false hope of a do-over. Despite my best efforts over the last few months two things have become clear. One, I’m probably never going to play for the New York Philharmonic. Two, last November isn’t coming back […]
- Is Your Hospital Anti-Baby?Pregnant women – a public service announcement: the facility of choice for your birth experience might be Baby-Hostile. You should probably check. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has created a “global initiative” entitled The Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative (BFHI). And thank goodness. What new mother w […]
- All mothers are not Kate Middleton.Good news, all you new mothers out there! Now you have something else to feel guilty about, because you needed one more thing to feel guilty about! You already know that you baby must be put to sleep on his back in a crib with a firm mattress and no pillows, blankets, toys, or bumpers. […]
- Practice vs. PerformanceIt is one of the most boring truisms on the planet: “Practice makes perfect.” It is also one of the most misleading. Practice merely ingrains certain patterns after deciding on the best course of action after constant criticism and problem-solving. Performance requires that the body forget the work required to ingrain the pattern and let […]
- Prove ItI was recently honored by a request to write a piece for the journal Outpatient Surgery. Having duly provided a pithy and witty ditty about the Veteran’s Administration MD vs CRNA kerfuffle, the editor dutifully came back at me with an edit. He said: “Can you give a specific example of how the broad knowledge […]
- MACRA – doubling down on acronyms.The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has felt your regulatory pain, apparently. They have watched you flounder in the muddy waters of ICD-10 and Meaningful Use. They have agonized with you over Quality Indicators. So, in an effort to “streamline” the “quality” metrics, and thus get a better handle on who is a […]
- No papers? No problem!An immigration issue has come to my attention that I thought I would weigh in on. I wrote a piece awhile back in support of Foreign Medical Graduates (FMGs) that bent a bunch of people over at KevinMD out of shape. I guess that makes me an expert in all things foreign and medical-ly, because […]
- Gambling ManMy thanks to Dr. John Mandrola of theheart.org/Medscape Cardiology for the idea for this post. Dr. Mandrola is an interventional cardiologist but I forgive him for that because he also reads the fine print and dares to question the status quo, particularly when it comes to preventive medicine. An interesting paper came out this month […]
- Humans will be human.This week the governor of the great state of Massachusetts, my home state, signed into law a bill that puts strict limits on new opioid prescriptions, specifically a limit of a dosage sufficient for 72 hours, among other things. This of course, is in response to the opioid addiction problem afflicting the country. Many other […]
- The End of Empathy
