Many people with chronic pain find themselves interacting with clinicians who do not seem to trust them. Why is it hard to establish a trusting relationship with your doctor? And what can you do about it? I have been on both sides of the exam table – as a physician caring for people with chronic…
During his campaign, President Trump promised to “end inflation and make America affordable again, to bring down the prices of all goods.” In honor of that promise, Dr. Mehmet Oz, head of the Medicare program, should address the enormous increase in what Medicare patients are being asked to pay for drugs. Medicare drug coverage is…
Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, millions of people receive generous subsidies to cover the cost of health insurance. Some people, in fact, receive coverage for free, their monthly premiums paid in full by the federal government. Unfortunately, even a small change in price can cause people to lose their coverage. That’s important…
We all know what “a complainer” is: it’s a person who finds the dark side of everything, who turns a casual conversation starter—“How are you doing?”—into a somber soliloquy about all the (usually minor) problems making their life unbearable. Too often, people with chronic pain are viewed as complainers by friends, family, and even their…
Anyone who has raised kids knows what happens when you give them a monthly allowance without requiring any work in return: they plop in front of their new videogame consoles while their dirty dishes collect in the sink. That’s the logic behind Republican plans to establish work requirements for people who receive safety net benefits—if…
I am going to be writing about chronic pain: diagnosis, treatment, mistreatment, etc, in upcoming posts. In my first post, i describe part of my own pain journey. The post is here. And it starts with me standing “in the back of the conference hall panicked that I was going blind.”
Your father’s rheumatoid arthritis medicine was working well, fighting off that otherwise debilitating illness. Then he found out that Medicare would no longer pay for the drug. Your aunt’s multiple sclerosis was flaring and her neurologist recommended a promising new treatment. But she learned that she would have to try, and “fail,” on two other…
Many companies are large enough they self-insure—they take on the financial risk of paying for their employees’ health expenses. In these cases, there is no insurance company around to negotiate prices. Instead, your employer must bring itself to the negotiating table (or maybe, these days, to the negotiation-Zoom-room?). That might mean that your costs, including…
Colon cancer is often preventable with timely screening. One way to be screened is through a procedure called colonoscopy, where a physician examines your colon with a camera to look for precancerous polyps. Unfortunately, some physicians are not as thorough as they should be and overlook growths they should be removing. It might be time…
The starting salary of an orthopedic surgeon in the United States is $565,000. Family medicine physicians, by contrast, can expect a starting salary closer to $250,000, a good living by almost any measure, but a pay disparity that doesn’t strike most experts as reflecting the value, or importance, of these two specialties. If Kennedy wants…