During my morning drive recently, a radio story on the “productivity paradox” caught my attention. Briefly put, the story explored economists’ concerns that despite ongoing technological development, our actual work productivity (ie. value produced per hour worked) on a global scale has stagnated. We seem to be coming up with fancier and more developed ways to […]
America needs to set aside ideologically driven approaches to healthcare, argues William Cayley […]
A week ago, the news was awash with shock, dismay, and outrage over President Trump’s executive order of 27 January, which temporarily suspended the United States’s refugee program and indefinitely barred the admittance of refugees from Syria. While it has been heartening to read reports of protests, and to see the number of professional and […]
As our measurements and metrics in medicine proliferate and multiply, it is exceedingly tempting to think that our increased ability to measure correlates directly with an increased ability to care or cure . . . but is this really the case? It’s been reasonably well established that just doing a test to “rule out” a […]
As medicine continues to grow in complexity and diversity, it is fair to ponder what roles may be best suited for the medical workforce of the future. A recent opinion piece argued that since we have no models permitting “any single physician to simultaneously and effectively serve the many patient subpopulations that exist,” we need […]
What difference makes a difference? We often encourage patients to make small behavioral changes, in the hope that even one step in the right direction is at least small progress. However, when it comes to medical care, and testing in particular, I think we forget that some changes are not really changes at all. As […]
Much has been written in recent years about “narrative medicine” or “narrative based medicine,” and there has even been discussion of how to integrate “narrative” and “evidence based” medicine in both journal articles and books. Most of this work (very helpfully) focuses on the narratives of patients: who they are as people, how their sufferings affect them, how […]
In a recent BMJ blog Steve Ruffenach made some excellent points on the importance of balancing “accept” and “except” in approaching “Tech” in medicine. However, as we continue to feel the pressure of realizing “meaningful use” of electronic medical records (often with attendant requirements for documentation, reporting, and ad-nauseam clicks of different buttons in each patient’s chart), I’ve […]
One of my favorite radio pundits is EJ Dionne, so I was intrigued to read in my morning paper his opinion piece, asking “where are our faith leaders?” In short, he argues that in today’s society discussions about religion have mainly been subsumed under political discussion of issues about which religious people care (or are about which they […]
Drawing on a variety of demonstrated correlations between happiness (or “wellbeing”) and health, John Appleby recently argued that “improving individual, and hence national, wellbeing might best be achieved through improving people’s health.” While I appreciate any suggestion of policies or interventions that might boost health, I also think it worth considering whether the argument may […]