Not long ago, I attended a retirement party for a former colleague. He had been a surgeon for 43 years at a hospital where I was once chairman of surgery. A number of old friends and colleagues whom I hadn’t seen for a long time...
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Here’s a little story from the early days of my first job as a chairman of surgery. Shortly after...
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A paper reporting the results of a survey of women surgeons on the topic of pregnancy appears in...
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“Collateral damage: the effect of patient complications on the surgeon’s psyche”...
Read MoreApparently a few years ago someone decreed that “non-compliant” was no longer a politically correct term to describe patients who did not take their medicines or follow instructions. The newspeak to use is now “non-adherent.”...
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Let’s talk about proton pump inhibitors (PPIs). These drugs, successors to the innovative H2...
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Here is an extreme “system error” type of response to an event that seems to have been a human...
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A recent survey from staffing company Jackson Healthcare found that 68% of physicians gave the...
Read MoreIt’s 8:15 p.m. I am at home. My beeper goes off, and I check it instantly. It reads, “555-1212” [Number changed to comply with HIPAA regulations]. It’s the inpatient surgical floor. Within 10 seconds, I have dialed the number....
Read MoreRichard Smith, a former editor of the British Medical Journal, wrote a thoughtful essay offering guidance for new medical students. (Full text here.) Although it was published in 2003, someone just brought it to my attention via...
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If you wonder why hospitals are under fire for outrageous and often baffling accounting practices,...
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