The United States is currently facing the largest measles outbreak in three decades, with more than 1,200 cases reported to the Centers for Disease Control. The spread of that disease is a mere symptom of one of the most dangerous pandemics of our time…
Category: primary care
Physician office notes should have an executive summary
I have advocated before for putting a visit synopsis at the beginning of each visit note. I have called that the aSOAP note. I think that works immensely better than APSO notes that only rearrange the order of the elements. The reason I say that is tha…
Burnout in fashion and medicine: A fashion designer turned physician compares notes
“Fashion Is Moving Too Fast, and It’s Killing Creativity,” by Veronique Hyland, talks about burnout in the fashion industry. As a former Fashion Designer turn physician, my curiosity was peaked. If you substituted the word “medicine” …
Uber and Lyft are playing larger roles for Medicaid
Arizona Medicaid Director Jami Snyder heard many complaints about enrollees missing medical appointments because the transportation provided by the state didn’t show or came too late. So this summer she hatched a solution familiar to millions of Americ…
20 minutes isn’t long enough for an office visit
As many of you know, if you’ve read my columns regularly, once a year the whole family escapes from the city, and we travel up to New Hampshire to stay at the lake house that’s been in my wife’s family for over 100 years. A modest woo…
Religion and spirituality are in the exam room
Religion and spirituality play a role in both patient’s and provider’s lives. Despite this, medical school is usually an atheistic experience. I went to a state-run medical school. No consideration of religion happened throughout my entire medical scho…
Is automation the anti-workaround?
Anyone who has spent any time on the internet knows better than to spend much time on the comments from an opinion piece. The comments section, even one on a site as reputable and respected as the New York Times, is often a minefield of trolls, contrar…
Primary care could hold the key to preventing Alzheimer’s disease
To delay or prevent the onset of memory loss, talk to your doctor. It can really be that simple. Among the diseases that Americans fear most, Alzheimer’s and dementia consistently rank at the top of the list. What people don’t always realize is that ma…
The answer to physician burnout isn’t resilience training
The answer to physician burnout is purported to be resilience training. That’s like glorifying the natural ability of frogs to tolerate gradually heating and boiling water. Unfortunately, health care today has some toxic ingredients, and physician burn…
Doctors, do you really understand?
There is a haze lurking overhead clouding rational thinking. Thoughts wander back to times when my body was unencumbered, and I felt nothing was out of my grasp. Maybe that was an unrealistic thought, but it is how youth and inexperience protect one f…
