While hundreds of doctors have submitted (mostly unfavorable) comments to CMS on the proposed evaluation and management changes, there are other issues which seem to be receiving much less attention than they deserve. And one of those may hit physicians who perform procedures in the wallet. In 2015, Congress asked CMS to analyze the global […]
She tells me that she sees them at night when she is lying in her bunk bed — eight to a room. Grotesque forms with masks over their heads and guns across their chests. She hears panicked shrieks, but is never certain if they are coming from the next trailer, or if they are inside […]
Can the health system survive? It comes down to the people. It is not about their work, but how they feel: feeling valued, feeling their work is valuable to those they serve, and feeling valuable doing the work. It is work as an extension of what you believe, what you love and how you want […]
Have you ever been the only customer in your local supermarket? Although the experience can be a bit unnerving, at first, you soon start to notice the advantages: No line at the deli, no pushy shoppers, no carts jamming up the produce section. As you breeze through checkout, you think to yourself, “Gee, I could […]
A colleague recently sent me a link to the American College of Cathopathic Physicians a new organization whose mission “is to protect the professional autonomy and advocate for a full, broad scope of practice for DNPs as a ‘cathopathic physician’ completely equal in every way to our MD and DO counterparts.” I was, I admit, so stunned by […]
From 2009 to 2012, I directed the graduate course “Fundamentals of Clinical Preventive Medicine” at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. It was a required course for Hopkins preventive medicine residents, and also usually attracted other master’s level public health students and undergraduates with a strong interest in medicine. The class size was […]
So let’s get down to it. Everyone is tired of shooting sprees. If you’re a gun owner, you’re tired of seeing weapons abused and misused to harm the innocent. If you’re a gun opponent, you feel the same way but can’t imagine why anyone has these weapons in the first place. I get it. I […]
When Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JP Morgan (AmBerGan) announced their health care partnership, Berkshire CEO Warren Buffett declared “the ballooning costs of health care act as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy.” He is right. Our broken system is infested with tapeworms. Tapeworms are parasites; they exploit their hosts, drain resources, and suck the […]
“I love what I do. I hate what I have to do.” It’s a quote that doctors attribute to their profession behind closed doors. As patients, we are so overwhelmed with our own problems. We fail to notice that our doctor may be battling her own problems with a complicated system. But what do we […]
American physicians dole out lots of unnecessary medical care to their patients. They prescribe things like antibiotics for people with viral infections, order expensive CT scans for patients with transitory back pain, and obtain screening EKGs for people with no signs or symptoms of heart disease. Some critics even accuse physicians of ordering such services […]
