Trying out a new feature here at Over My Med Body. Short little commentaries on links, a la KevinMD , as there’s tons of great blog posts and health policy news, and so little time to discuss them! (Also, this will be more productive than watching The People’s Court and Montel.)

• Dr. Wes pimps med students interviewing for residency on billing codes , and Kevin (I hope jokingly) says med students should have to get an MBA before starting med school. How silly. The point of med school (which most of the commenters point out) is to give you a foundation of knowledge to learn how to practice medicine, get exposed to all the medical specialties, and prepare you for internship. It’s residency that should be teaching doctors about how to be an attending. (All the residency programs I’ve seen so far have a specific “Administration” component to them where you learn about billing and getting paid.) Wes says med students “are woefully unprepared to enter the big wide world of medicine,” but if there’s some way to enter medicine without doing a residency, I missed that day in class.
• Via KevinMD, this great quote about the two sides of medicine we’re trying to turn into one: “Today, we are in between two images of the doctor. One image is the heroic personal savior, who uses his own experience and intimate knowledge of the patient to make the best decisions. The other image is the trained technician, who gathers data, feeds it into a decision tree, and implements that recommended course of action.” Totally agree. The best is the caring, experienced doctor who knows the data, when to use it–and when not to.
• College is not the time that many young women want to get pregnant, but Congress isn’t making that any easier , closing a provision that allowed drug companies to sell cheap birth control to student health centers. A monthly supply used to be $3-$10, now it’s $30-$50. Some members of Congress are aware of the issue, but can’t get it fixed, since birth control pills are so closely tied to abortion (that’s sarcasm). It’s amazing to me that tiny little oversights can have such huge impacts on people’s lives.
• Mitt Romney is taking heat for a Planned Parenthood fundraiser photo from years ago. People say this doesn’t go along with his views on abortion. But as we all know, esteemed readers, Planned Parenthood probably prevents more abortions a year than it performs .
• Speaking of bad daytime television, I saw this quack tell a poor woman suffering from pretty classic hypnopompic sleep paralysis that she was just doing “astral projection.” The poor lady was scared out of her mind, thinking the devil was visiting her.
• This pilot program at UCLA sounds pretty awesome –bilingual docs who train in Spanish-speaking countries get help preparing for US board exams in exchange for 3 years working in under-served areas in California. More surprising in the article is the claim that only 8 of the 27 family medicine residents at the highlighted residency speak Spanish. (I’d imagine all of them can at least speak basic Spanish.) But I agree–there are certainly nuances that you lose only speaking basic Spanish, and cultural nuances that affect what a person is saying.

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