Physicians should not be spending more time on administrivia than they are on patient care.
The practice of medicine should not be the practice of bureaucracy
Tag: medical practice
Are TV doctors empowering real patients?
Medical television shows are some of the oldest around — especially soapy productions like E.R. and General Hospital. Whether it’s comedy (Scrubs) or drama (Grey’s Anatomy), we eat up medical shows in every way, shape, or form, and we mourn them when they’re tragically dropped from the broadcast schedule. Some of us grow up watching them and want to […]
It’s Time to Ban Pharmaceutical Ads
Despite my best efforts, every now and then an ad slips through on Hulu. (Yes, Hulu, sorry, I ignore your ominous notes telling me that I am a horrible person for using an ad blocker, but I refuse to be shown the same inane four ads over and over and over again in your increasingly […]
Educating Doctors About Interacting With Fat Patients
As the mainstream media constantly harp on the ‘obesity epidemic’ and warn us all of the growing numbers of fatties sweeping the nation, one thing people seem reluctant to do is to adjust medical education when it comes to teaching trainee doctors how to interact with fat patients. As this is a world where fat […]
Yes, Doctor, I Know I’m Fat
After battling righteously with Covered California, I’m covered by Kaiser, and in January, I made my first official visit as an insured patient to meet my preferred provider (whom I had to pick from a website, making me feel like I had stumbled into alternate reality online dating) and to start being slowly ingested into […]
Exploiting Autistic Children with Unscientific and Dangerous Treatments
While autism occurs in people of all ages (obviously, as people on the autism spectrum don’t drop dead when we hit 18), autism among children occupies the vast amount of column inches, attention, focus, medical research, and other resources dedicated to autism. In part, this is because of lobbying on the part of autistic parents, […]
Further Episodes In Foetus Fetishism
We all know that the United States is a nation that holds so firmly to the fetishism of the foetus that it will go to incredible lengths in its ‘protection’ of foetuses, nonviable and not. The frenzy as conservatives try to convince themselves that foetuses across the land are in a critical state of danger […]
Waiting to Die: Medical Literacy, Palliative Care, and Guilt
Medical advances in the United States have radically changed the way people interact with the medical system. The change from even fifty years ago has been stunning in terms of what patients can survive, what kinds of treatments are available, and how the system processes people with serious illnesses. And one of the areas in […]
Who’s Afraid of Evidence-Based Medicine?
In all the chaos surging around the conversation in the United States as people grapple with health care reform, there’s one area where people seem to be particularly confused: evidence-based medicine. A practice widely adopted in the rest of the world, evidence-based medicine still seems to be something people in the United States are afraid […]
Is There A Grey’s Anatomy Effect?
Like the CSI franchise, Grey’s Anatomy has become an important cultural institution in the United States; the primetime soap may be yet another iteration of a long-established television category, but something about it is compelling audiences to tune in season after season. This even after the plots get more and more absurd and the characters […]