Killing Care Softly It’s official: doctors treat charts, not people. Harvard researcher Russell Phillips reckons physicians of many stripes are now “data entry technicians.” My preferred term is “checklist monkeys.” The results for your health care? Not good. How much time and energy are really wasted? Recent reports show ER physicians spending 44% of their time […]
Steal from the Poor, Give to the Rich, Harm Them Both
President Trump is correct – “everybody has better health care than the US” (at least in developed countries.) So why does he support the House’s new version of the American Health Care Act, that could kill many thousands of Americans while simultaneously worsening health care for all, including the rich? Statements by people behind the […]
Checklist Medicine Checks You Out
Why Your Doctor Doesn’t Look at You Anymore Should you treat the chart, or the patient? Increasingly over the past decades healthworkers of all stripes – doctors and nurses, therapists and technicians – buff the chart first. Legal, insurance and regulatory requirements have burgeoned to overcome the concerns of health. Checklists work very well in military and […]
Saving Sleep Medicine
Sleep medicine appears in decline. Sleep centers and laboratories are closing at record rates. Yet how can sleep medicine be dying when the population suffers so much from insomnia and sleep apnea, while the public increasingly recognizes sleep as critical to happiness, performance, and preventing most major medical illnesses? The answer: insurance reimbursement. After Colin Sullivan […]
Even the CIA doesn’t trust your health care (12/03/10)
Your Survival is On the Line In a time of Wikileaks revelations it’s hard for any story to stand out. When US diplomats are asked to obtain DNA samples of any significant foreigner they meet, and the Saudi King is telling the US how to bomb Iran, who cares that the CIA says the US […]