I need to know what you think of the following situation. You walk into your doctor’s office, turn your insurance information into the clerk, take a seat in the waiting room and discover the following letter sitting on the couch-side table, authored by your very own doctor: “Dear Patient: Section 1311 of the new health…
Here is a link to my guest spot on You, The Owner’s Manual radio show, hosted by New York Times best-selling author Dr. Michael Roizen. It is a lively interview, worth listening to if for no other reason than Roizen’s great taste in writing: “I really enjoyed the book,” he said to me at one…
The University of Chicago Medicine’s MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, where I trained in the early 90s, has been awarded the prestigious Cornerstone Award from the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities for “outstanding contributions from an institution that has helped shape the direction of the fields of bioethics and/or medical humanities.” To learn…
In residency, we had a term for ER docs who always seemed to find an excuse to admit patients to the hospital. We called them sieves. Recent evidence suggests that sieves in the ER drive up costs, workloads, and hospital utilization; but they do not save lives.
The book Critical Decisions: How You and Your Doctor Can Make the Right Medical Choices Together by Peter A. Ubel, MD effectively makes the case that good medical decisions require empowered patients, clinicians prepared to support them and techniques to help them communicate.[1] Better than any existing literature, this book highlights techniques and behaviors that clinicians…
Watch this segment from HuffPo Live on two children denied transplants because they were not deemed mentally capable enough to benefit. Two angry moms are fighting back. Love to hear your thoughts.