In the United States, 25 million adult women are insured by their state Medicaid program. Medicaid covers 60 percent of all births in the United States as per federal law, and states must cover all pregnancy-related services for pregnant women with inc…
“Pathognomonia.” I do not believe this is a real word. That’s OK. I don’t care if it isn’t. I have wanted to write this little blurb several times over a period of a few years. My theme is related to what we physicians regard as pathognomon…
Of late, doctor/friends on social media have taken to reposting news articles detailing the horrors taking place in other nations because of the evil scourge known as socialized medicine. In fact, the two words, alone or together, just don’t carry anyt…
From second through fifth grade, I mastered the art of being sick. I got out of school, soccer practice and piano lessons so that I could be the child I wanted to be — not sick, but loved, cared for. Here was my recipe: 1. Wake up. 2. Feel anxious abou…
Coffee —”because of the caffeine which it holds,” described Dr. Henry Elsner in a 1911 review article in the journal of Hypertension and Arteriosclerosis — causes “increased rapidity of the heart’s action. It makes the heart irr…
Physicians receive rigorous medical training for the better part of a decade. However, we emerge unprepared for the real-world job application process to which our friends in other professions are accustomed. One of these logistics includes credentiali…
In the mid-1990s, I was working as the medical director for a national computer processing company that had the medical policy and utilization review contract for many Medicaid programs in the United States. Within the first few weeks of being hired, I…
A few years ago, after doing the work and mom thing for five-plus years, I noticed I was becoming increasingly cynical. I was, more often than not, in a bad mood — and I felt exhausted. One day I sat down and asked myself: “What the hell is going on wi…
A lot has been spoken and written about clinical documentation already. In spite of that, many hospitals still struggle in getting the best out of their doctors when it comes to documentation quality. And although we can cite various reasons for this, …
Doctors are notoriously bad with money. Part of this has to do with the fact that the schools that prepare our future doctors are ill equipped to teach them about money. When I was a fourth-year medical student, my school had a financial group come a…
