Nothing quite prepares you for the American cemetery in Normandy, the final resting place for 9,380 lives cut short in World War II. Even if you’ve seen “Saving Private Ryan,” you can’t help feeling an emotional gut punch, a com…
Category: Public Health & Policy
Reduce health care’s carbon footprint to save our patients
I would like to explore a typical American health care experience through a different lens: energy. Upon entering a hospital, I would see bright lighting and hear the gentle hum from ventilation. If I were to get an MRI, this requires significant energ…
What Ocasio-Cortez and Cruz get right about birth control
I think we can all agree that women have a lot more hoops to jump through when it comes to contraception. If a woman wants to go on the pill, she has to go through the bureaucratic process of seeing a doctor and getting a prescription. This is why I am…
Should physicians stay in their lane on abortion?
Now more than ever, it seems that medicine, politics, social justice, and societal mores have become intertwined. There are so many “lanes” that the 405 to the 10 freeway splits seem like country roads in comparison. Perhaps we have social …
How technology ruined, and can save, the doctor-patient relationship
Each year, Medical Economics surveys physician readers to find out what irks them most. Topping the latest list: insurance paperwork, followed closely by electronic health records (EHRs). The reason is the same for both. Insurers and EHRs get between d…
Does medical school train students to become managers or leaders?
I worked with someone (not a physician, but that doesn’t really matter here) whose title was “assistant director.” He and I quickly recognized that we worked well together: His head brimmed with big visions and ideas, whereas my head brimmed with plans…
An American physician in Sweden. Here’s what he thought about its health care.
I had the distinct pleasure working with family physician colleagues in Sweden recently. It was a similar experience to a trip I made to Britain about five years ago that I also wrote about. I got to spend some time watching one of my colleagues care f…
Are hospitalists to blame for the fragmentation of medical care?
“What About Recovery” is a provocative essay by Yale professor Lenore Buckley, MD, in JAMA. She writes in detail about the death of her 68-year-old brother in a hospital. She felt his doctors did not do enough to help him recover because his nutritiona…
Why you’re an unhappy physician
Health care is a tough job to work in — whether you are a doctor, nurse or any other professional. We are dealing with matters of life and death, our patients expect (and deserve) the best from us, and we always have a hundred-and-one things to d…
Welcome to the new normal: practices of 500 physicians or more
The day of solo practitioners is coming to an end. In its place will be gaggles of gastroenterologists and flocks of physicians. Mega practices are becoming the norm in American medical care. Here’s a few pictures of this trend, somewhat dated (they on…
