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: […]
The purpose of this post is to clarify important issues about cardiac devices as they relate to deactivation. As I wrote yesterday, Paula Span of the NY Times covered this important issue earlier this week. Her coverage came about because of this Mayo Clinic paper published in JAMA-IM, which showed most patients with cardiac devices […]
The news came via a direct message on Twitter. “You got a plug in the NY times. Congrats.” (Thanks Dr. Jay Schloss.) Paula Span, author of the NY Times’ The New Old Age Blog, reported today on the issue of cardiac device deactivation in patients who are approaching end of life. The role I had […]
What follows is a guest post. James Patrick Murphy, MD, MMM is board-certified in Pain, Addiction, and Anesthesiology. He is President of The Greater Louisville Medical Society and the Course Director for OPIOID — Optimal Prescribing Is Our Inherent Duty. Dr Murphy, a friend, writes on the matter of optimal prescribing of pain therapy. It’s […]
It goes without saying that caregivers are not interchangeable. Quality matters. What else is there other than our health? From the day I began as a doctor, the absence of a legitimate meritocracy has been a source of inflammation. In 1996, when I started private practice, referrals depended too much on old-boy networks. In 2014, […]
Elisabeth Rosenthal, a reporter with the New York Times, is doing American doctors a favor. Her series, Paying Till it Hurts, is forcing us to face our role in the US healthcare problem. That’s a good thing, because, as it goes in the practice of Medicine, the first step to achieving good outcomes is identifying […]
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 […]
President Obama has a few good ideas. He wants Americans to discuss healthcare this holiday season. That’s actually a really good idea. This blog aims to do some good in the area of medicine and health. What follows are two incredibly important essays. The consolation prize is an excerpt from my recent Top Ten post. […]
When the editors of Medscape asked me to write a Top Ten article on the best Cardiology stories in 2013, I jumped at the chance. I spent a lot of time thinking about Cardiology this year. I was invested. Plus, 2013 was a year for pivoting–big time pivoting. What made news in 2013 was not […]