Several years ago, a group of us concerned about health care costs and outcomes met with some local HR benefit managers. One was the head HR person of a city. In part of the conversation, she raved about a local chain of urgent care centers. She loved …
Back when cholesterol target numbers ruled unopposed (before 2013), we all checked fasting lipids every three months. Before 2012, we also checked liver function quarterly in hapless riders on the cholesterol pill merry-go-round. That year the FDA anno…
Shock. Horror. Did you just read the title correctly, or are you seeing things? Well, after you recover from the shock of reading a line you probably never thought you could possibly see in writing — let me tell you this: Physicians and politicia…
Physician well-being is a major focus of many physician organizations and is frequently highlighted in popular media. Some have described the root of the problem as a disconnect between expectation and reality. This is a helpful framework for situati…
Compassion. Empathy. These are some of the words commonly thrown around in medical school and residency training. If you ask most medical students why they chose medicine, they will respond with something like this: “ I love to help people,” or “I want…
When my father reached his mid-80s, an accelerating accumulation of physical and mental functioning issues persuaded him to switch to a primary care physician in a concierge medical practice. Although the doctor’s pedigree proclaimed his competence, he…
I don’t mean to pick on McDonald’s. Insert any other large retail business where customer satisfaction massively trumps every other consideration of the relationship between employee and customer. Telemedicine companies have exploded the past few years…
Figuring out what’s actually true is far harder than most people realize. Our brains are both hypothesis-generating machines and incredibly credulous. As a result, most of the things we believe to be true turn out to be false. We don’t just mistakenly …
Comparing the 2018 U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommendation statement on prostate cancer screening in the October 15th issue of American Family Physician with its previous recommendation, the first question family physicians ought to…
I’ve only worked four shifts of urgent care so far, but four 12-hour shifts means I’ve seen a lot: a lot of patients, a lot of different ailments, a lot of different reasons that people come to urgent care centers. I have to admit that this…
