What really makes a person complete? What do we want in our lives, and what is it like to become our best, most fulfilled selves? In the 1960s, psychologist Abraham Maslow tried to answer this question. This eventually led to his well-known hierarchy o…
How would you make sense of the following vignette: Over a 40-plus-year period, a disease (“X”) is diagnosed, its causes are defined, and effective treatments are prescribed 30-50+ percent of people working in your organization are currentl…
Access to care, patient advocacy, health disparities: These are all buzzwords in health care now. We, as health care providers, understand that we must do the best for our patients in the hopes of providing a positive outcome. So, despite our perceptio…
Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians. A 79-year-old man is evaluated for a 2-month history of progressive malaise and weakness, aching bilateral shoulders and hips, and stiffness …
As physicians, we find ourselves in higher tax brackets than the majority of Americans. With the graduated tax system here in the U.S., the more we make, the higher the percentage of taxes we owe. That is not just because of the tax brackets, but also …
Becoming a physician in 2019 presents its share of challenges. Providers must deal with reimbursement rates that remain a fraction of their previous levels, adapt to a fee-for-value model, adopt ever-advancing technology as an integral part of care del…
Most new cancer treatments haven’t been proven to help patients live longer or feel better. Instead, they delay the growth of tumors — which may be faster to measure but doesn’t necessarily indicate a tangible benefit for patients. But you wouldn’t gra…
The Healthcare Incentives Framework helps show how to fix incentives in health care systems. It starts by enumerating the five jobs we expect a health care system to do for us and then identifies which parties in the health care system (providers or in…
It’s that time of year when the weather outside is growing colder, the evenings seem to kick off way too early in the day, and the decorations around town remind all of us all of the fast-approaching holiday season. But for many of us obstetricians, th…
There are many disparities in health care. Black mothers have a much higher rate of maternal death than do white women. All women are less likely to get guideline-advised cardiac care than do men. Among the many such examples, perhaps the hardest dispa…
