No offense Eric (friend who works for an IRB) but danah boyd’s letter from E. Scrooge to Santa about his IRB violations is spot-on.
Time’s 50 best websites of 2007.
Need another guilty pleasure blog? Passive Aggressive Notes.
January 2nd, 2008Happy New Year’s Eve, everyone.
Sad, scary, and awful story about a tiger who somehow escaped from her cage at the SF Zoo, killing one person and seriously injuring two others . Everyone was taken to SF General, the only level one trauma center in the city.
From Med Rants, about retainer medicine:
I urge these authors and their ideological colleagues to look beyond the trappings. I urge them to perform a thought experiment. Why are patients increasingly willing to pay? Why are highly ethical physicians opting for this style of practice? If they are honest, they will find some truths that knee jerk opposition obscures.
Some might argue that these “highly ethical physicians” aren’t so highly ethical by practicing retainer medicine. One ethical framework would suggest if all physicians just practiced retainer medicine, there would not be nearly enough physicians to go around. In that framework, retainer medicine would be viewed as unethical.
(I also don’t really get how Dr. Centor combats the classist and racist arguments he brings up. They’re totally valid, and I can’t help but draw a parallel between retainer medicine and insurance company cherry-picking, the latter I find to be despicable in its bottom-line philosophy. By practicing retainer medicine, you are selecting out for people who can afford to pay extra, and health and SES are intrinsically linked (and also race), so you’re essentially picking out people who are already healthier. If you look at things through an equality and social justice lens, who needs a physician’s help more: the poor, smoking diabetic or the executive with an HDL of 39 who bikes 20 miles a day?) (I however absolutely agree with Dr. Centor that health care financing is a complete and total disaster in the US, but I would argue we need to fundamentally change the system–yes, with all the turmoil and terrible problems and growing pains it would cause–than work within it and continue to try piecemeal approaches we’ve been attempting since the 1970s.)
A woman with chronic syncope needing pacemaker placement worries about future costs for replacement pacemakers on Ask MeFi . Most posters suggest she move to Canada; one even offers to marry her.
What a mess. Classic example of someone who clearly couldn’t buy her own insurance–it’s doubtful anyone would cover her syncope condition, so she’d be paying hundreds of thousands of dollars over her lifetime for her “pre-existing condition.” Just one of the many problems with an individual mandate.
Don McCanne points me to To Great A Burden (PDF), a report by Families USA which analyzes data on health care expenditures, and finds some pretty scary numbers and trends (my emphasis below):
My point? These are the insured we’re talking about. The people who we quickly call “the covered.” And it’s gotten significantly worse in only 8 years:
Wake up, middle class. You don’t want to risk health care reform when you’re satisfied with your care, but how long until you’re part of the insured millions of families spending 25% of their income on health care?
And wake up, political candidates (and bloggers) that support individual mandates or continuation of the hodgepodge mess of private plans we have here–with their lifetime caps and pre-existing conditions, even the insured here are getting the rationing everyone’s so scared of under some sort of national system.
I love it. If you answer anything but 1, you’re indirectly acknowledging that there might be something less than optimal with your drinking. If you answer
1, you ask people to volunteer their own ideas about what’s good and bad about drinking. It’s essentially a sneaky way to plant discrepancy and
cognitive dissonance in a patient’s mind.
Now of course, duh, this won’t work for everyone. Just thought it was a very clever way to force the patient to come up with his or her own ideas instead of
casting that whole “You shouldn’t be drinking so much” light onto patients.
Saw a sneak preview of Juno tonight. Biggest laugh of the movie, talking about physicians:
“Well, honey, doctors are sadists who like to play God and watch lesser people scream.”
Funny ’cause it was true, I guess. Man. I felt kind of guilty.
Interesting list to check out ; lame there’s not even one medical or science blog on the list.
December 20th, 2007