BACK of the BOOK
Heard in the Blogosphere
Tim Lahey, MD
@TimLaheyMD
What’s harder than saying the
names of these new cancer drugs?
Paying for them.
Aaron Logan, MD, PhD
@hemedoc
Giving a bit of my own blood
for research. Related: I can’t
feel my toes.
New Doctor Versus Old
Don’t Yelp Your Doctor
“Sometimes [patients and I] square off. Former providers have left behind situations I cannot live with: orders
for tests I consider unnecessary, medications that strike
me as bizarre or prohibitively risky. I can’t refill those
for you, I say. The responses vary, but no one is ever
pleased. ... Still, no one can make me do what I think is
wrong — not the state licensing me, nor the profession
credentialing me, nor the patient hollering at me. …
Fortunately, somewhere out there is a patient for every
doctor and a doctor for every patient, in sickness and in
health, for better or for worse.”
“[Online customer reviews and ratings] are, unfortunately, becoming ubiquitous in the health-care sector. … How
can a patient, with no medical expertise, know that the
treatment option that he received was the best available
one? How can a patient’s family who lost him on a
hospital bed, know that physicians had provided their
loved one with the best possible medical care? While the
interaction between patients and their medical providers
is an important element of the medical care process, it is
not the most important one.”
—Abigail Zuger, MD, on the lingering influence
of a patient’s former doctor in
The New York Times
The Real Problem with Medical
Internships
“Interns and residents must experience a broad range of
clinical situations before they can become competent,
independent physicians. Compressing a heavy workload
into fewer hours serves no one’s interests. Combining
the complexity of today’s patient care with work-hour
restrictions may actually lead to more burnout among
trainees.”
ASH
@ASH_Hematology
—Sandeep Jauhar, MD, on the work-hour debate in medical
internships in The New York Times
—Niam Yaraghi, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center
for Technology Innovation, in U.S. News & World Report
Excuse Me, Doctor: I Can Still Hear
You
“Please remember I am in front of you, beneath you,
behind you when you talk to your colleagues. A curtain
is not soundproof, and I can still hear you when you are
in the corridor. So I can hear you complaining about your
boss, grumbling about your working circumstances, talking about the party you all had last night, or reprimanding your staff. When I can hear you doing these things, it
makes me feel unsafe. It makes me panic.”
—Marije Klein, a breast cancer patient, on the importance
of casual conversations in creating or destroying patients’
confidence and sense of 6fWG