A former student of mine who now works at the Advisory Board recently emailed me some figures her company put together, offering a snapshot of how many people are being hired in oncology practices to help patients with their financial concerns: I am very eager to see what these figures look like over the next…
While I was on vacation, I spoke with reporter about a topic near and dear to my heart – importance of getting clinicians to talk about health care costs with their patients. The reporter put together a very nice piece on the topic, which I thought I would share with you: Doctors Aren’t Grasping For…
Elizabeth’s breast cancer had already spread to her bones and was now invading lymph nodes in her right armpit, causing painful swelling that kept her up at night. Today, however, as she walked into her oncologist’s office, Elizabeth felt like things were under control. “All right, so how is your arm?” the oncologist asked. “Actually,…
Okay, worst blog post title of the year. But just trying to grab your attention and point you towards a nice USA Today article on doctors and emotional intelligence. “Tamir Mosharrafa, a plastic surgeon in Phoenix, recalls the 20-something woman who came in for liposuction. “Dani” was very lean and very pretty – and “absolutely…
Recently I have posted several entertaining pictures revealing the dangers of assuming that correlation implies causation. A lot of these pictures are housed on this fascinating website. Meanwhile, here’s another one I had to pass along: This can’t be coincidence, right? With all the strange movie choices Nicholas Cage makes, I always knew he was…
My patient had been feeling unusually irritable lately. Nothing had changed in his home or work life to bring on such a shift in mood. He wasn’t taking any medicines that could cause such symptoms either, being a strappingly healthy young guy. A weightlifter in fact. “Are you taking any kind of steroids?,” I asked…
In a wonderful article on deep cave exploration, Burkhard Bilger shows how powerful comparison can be in putting an unfamiliar topic into context. He is describing the arduous work involved in deep cave exploration. He is describing the risks of being far, far inside the cave when a heavy rain on the surface begins to…
I came across an interesting quote in the New Yorker recently, reflecting on the US banking system. It reads: The power and the growth of power of our financial oligarchs comes from wielding the savings and credit capital of others. The fetters which bind the people are forged from the people’s own gold. Pretty timely thoughts,…
Oscar Wilde is one of the most quotable people in history of the English language. He even had ideas about robots, many decades before people had any idea what robots could achieve. And in typical Wildean fashion, he provocatively tied it together with his attitudes on the advantages of slavery: “Unless there are slaves to…