Category: KevinMD

Generics aren’t going to help the cost of chemotherapy drugs

Chemotherapy drugs have become ridiculously expensive. Many new drugs come to market costing more than $100,000 per patient for a full course of treatment. Often, patients have to pay a significant portion of these costs. For example, a 20% co-insuranc…

Is personalized medicine mostly marketing and hype?

“Personalized” medicine sounds appealing. Rather than just guessing at what medication to try, a genetic test can figure out, in advance, which medications will be effective and which medications are more likely to make you sicker. Except it doesn’t wo…

Doctors: Never forget the importance of eye contact

Eye contact is one of the most basic mammalian traits that signals an interaction. Anybody who has a dog or cat at home sees on a daily basis how much animals value eye contact (and with dogs, it signals you’ve lost the battle!). In the case of health …

Geriatric medicine is a calling

Often people (mostly residents and medical students) ask why on earth did I choose to do a geriatric fellowship? My response is because it is the medicine of the future. While we are all aging, the fastest growing age groups are those born between 1946…

Sometimes, the biggest challenge to eliminate health disparities is geography

Driving north in a snowstorm Tuesday of Thanksgiving week I certainly took my time. I left after our Suboxone clinic wrap-up conference, around 7:30 p.m., and arrived at my unplowed driveway in Caribou about 1 a.m. On the way up, I saw two ambulances, …

When a child dies, this pediatrician grieves

I found his obituary today. Kids do not always have obituaries. I am not sure why. Perhaps it is because children are not supposed to die and no one quite knows what to say. Still, I always look for them. He loved the color green. His death was so unex…

What advocacy means to this physician

Patients first Patient care brings me enormous satisfaction. Nearly 40 years ago, when I chose medicine as a career, this was a driving force. Within moments of patients coming into my office, they often share aspects of their life history known only t…

What advocacy means to this physician

Patients first Patient care brings me enormous satisfaction. Nearly 40 years ago, when I chose medicine as a career, this was a driving force. Within moments of patients coming into my office, they often share aspects of their life history known only t…

Before you vent about your doctor on social media, read this

John and I met as young children and were high-school sweethearts. We married and put him through college and had four children during the process. He joined the Air Force to pay for medical school, and we spent four years overseas to help pay off the …

Are clinically integrated networks a cure for checkbox medicine?

Years ago, I was contacted by a health plan about an elderly nursing home patient who had not been screened for osteoporosis. While brittle bones are a big problem in skilled nursing settings, the real problem for this health plan was its low HEDIS sco…