She tells me that she sees them at night when she is lying in her bunk bed — eight to a room. Grotesque forms with masks over their heads and guns across their chests. She hears panicked shrieks, but is never certain if they are coming from the next trailer, or if they are inside […]
Have you ever been the only customer in your local supermarket? Although the experience can be a bit unnerving, at first, you soon start to notice the advantages: No line at the deli, no pushy shoppers, no carts jamming up the produce section. As you breeze through checkout, you think to yourself, “Gee, I could […]
From 2009 to 2012, I directed the graduate course “Fundamentals of Clinical Preventive Medicine” at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. It was a required course for Hopkins preventive medicine residents, and also usually attracted other master’s level public health students and undergraduates with a strong interest in medicine. The class size was […]
A store cashier sees dozens of customers during a shift. A car tire shop mechanic may work on 20 cars. Workdays can be hard across professions. Medicine surely does not escape this. We just don’t deal with customers or goods, despite efforts to make it look like that. A simple runny nose visit may be […]
So let’s get down to it. Everyone is tired of shooting sprees. If you’re a gun owner, you’re tired of seeing weapons abused and misused to harm the innocent. If you’re a gun opponent, you feel the same way but can’t imagine why anyone has these weapons in the first place. I get it. I […]
When Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JP Morgan (AmBerGan) announced their health care partnership, Berkshire CEO Warren Buffett declared “the ballooning costs of health care act as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy.” He is right. Our broken system is infested with tapeworms. Tapeworms are parasites; they exploit their hosts, drain resources, and suck the […]
American physicians dole out lots of unnecessary medical care to their patients. They prescribe things like antibiotics for people with viral infections, order expensive CT scans for patients with transitory back pain, and obtain screening EKGs for people with no signs or symptoms of heart disease. Some critics even accuse physicians of ordering such services […]
I am a terrible coder. I think I am a pretty good doctor, but when it comes to coding, the process of figuring out which billing code to pick to assign to a bill for an office visit, I am hopeless. No matter how many times I have had the rules explained to me, or […]
“Better patient care” is the reason hospital and health systems usually give when they merge or acquire one another. Our research suggests that mergers and affiliations might, paradoxically, increase the risk of harm to patients in the short run. Improving the safety of patient care is possible during mergers and affiliations, but requires intentional efforts. […]
It’s easy to get excited about technological advances such as nanobots that swim in blood to deliver drugs or 3-D printers that print human tissues. However, in our enthusiasm to find the next fix, we are failing to notice the ground slipping underneath the health care industry. Here are four trends that are changing health […]
