What is the greatest possible thing that could happen to you today? Is it winning a million dollars? Seeing your children smile? Going to a job you love? Perhaps it is waking up next to a spouse whom you love and is also your best friend? These are all winners, for sure. But what if […]
One of the biggest changes in healthcare in recent times is the emphasis on decision-making. Patients and doctors now work with big menus. It’s mostly a good thing, but a certainty with increased choice is increased conflict. As a doctor who works in a field–electrophysiology–that is almost exclusively preference-sensitive, I’ve grown increasingly interested in why […]
Everyone agrees that doctors should be informed and up-to-date. Perpetual medical education has always been a vital component of doctoring. But now, as the rapid pace of healthcare innovation pushes against the limits of biology, and really, our humanity, medical education gains even more importance. Doctors (and patients) must know what can and cannot be […]
…and this is the crux of the practice of medicine. I just had a Eureka moment while talking on the phone with a patient. We were discussing how to manage her increasingly frequent episodes of atrial fibrillation. She was also dealing with two other major health problems. She asked me: Are these things connected? In […]
A recent case taught me a lot about how people perceive their medicines. I was trying to help a 92-year-old man get off some of his medicine. I can’t go into the details, but suffice to say, there was much opportunity to trim a long list of drugs, many of which were threatening his existence […]
For me, maybe you too, the best part about science is how it disrupts the status quo. A belief, a way of doing something, a paradigm if you will, becomes entrenched. Humans love patterns. We get attached. I call this the way-it’s-always-been-done philosophy. It’s endemic in medicine, and, from what I can see, in education […]
Ali Almossawi is a young metrics engineer at Mozilla. He collaborates with the MIT media lab. He has done something quite remarkable, uplifting and useful. (And isn’t that a good thing these days.) He wrote a book called An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments. More than 500,000 people read the online version. Now there is […]
…one could be pessimistic. PBS NewsHour did this story last night. Adjunct professors, many of them with doctorates, are struggling to make a living. A French literature professor uses food stamps. An English professor just up and quit. This video got me thinking about the word “value.” The MacBook delivered this as the first definition: […]
If you had to write a one page memo to a Senator/Representative detailing the one thing they could do to improve US healthcare, what would it be? For me, it’s improving the wastefulness of our system. Here is my attempt at a memo: Comparative Effectiveness Research is a win-win: Knowledge always is. US healthcare is […]
Hey everyone… Welcome to 2014. I’m back from holiday. I like to say ‘holiday’ rather than ‘vacation.’ It sounds more Euro. Plus, if one truly seeks word precision, saying holiday when describing time in Key West works. Everything about that place is celebratory and festive. Let’s talk about reading and writing. First, I’m not going […]
I made a discovery this week about the novel anticoagulant medications, dabigatran (Pradaxa), rivaroxaban (Xarelto), apixaban (Eliquis) and edoxaban (Lixiana). I was looking into the often-asked question of how these new drugs compare to the old standard, warfarin. The discovery felt like a Eureka moment. I ran it by my stats guy–my son–and a couple […]
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