In the last decade, specifically in the last five to six years, we have seen the gradual disempowerment of America’s physicians as well as their unfortunate patients. Starting with health management organizations, managed care, all the way to the insur…
We are writing as a parent and a dentist to spread a message to parents and dental health care providers across Canada: there are alternatives to prescribing opioids after wisdom tooth removal. Removing wisdom teeth is considered by many as a rite of p…
I recently stopped by our local grocery store after work to pick up a handful of items to bring home. With only four items in hand, I luckily found a short checkout line behind this lovely elderly couple who were almost done and ready to pay. As they s…
2019 is here. I started my year by doing an urgent care shift on New Year’s day. It was not quite as busy as I expected; most of the shifts I’ve done around the holidays were high-volume, with lots of flu, other respiratory infections, and…
Does any living, breathing human believe that there is not enough paperwork in our lives? While we are all burdened, I believe that the medical profession is uniquely deluged with an absurd volume of documentation requirements, most of which should be …
86 minutes. That’s what I found when I added up how late patients were through a single practice session earlier in the week. Some patients arrived on time, and some a few minutes early, but the average was about 8 minutes late, ranging up to one…
I am beginning to think that we should not see chronic care patients between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. It just makes us look bad. Our quality metrics make the last blood pressure and the previous diabetic lab test of the year for each of our pat…
The purpose of clinical documentation is to efficiently communicate critical data to peers in a readable fashion while meeting compliance and billing requirements. This documentation should not represent a data dump. Physicians continually increase our…
A commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “Beyond Evidence-Based Medicine” received much well-deserved criticism for not only mischaracterizing EBM, but advocating for a novel approach, “interpersonal medicine,”…
A guest column by the American College of Physicians, exclusive to KevinMD.com. When reading (or writing) blog posts, it’s easy to be left with a mostly negative and often depressing view of the current state of medicine. This is completely understand…
