MD Whistleblower

While folks across the country were gathered around their holiday tables, I suspect that conversations were not focused on the First Thanksgiving when the Pilgrims broke bread with the Wampanoag native Americans over a 3 day feast in 1621.  There was no pumpkin pie or cranberry sauce served then, and it was more likely that venison was on the table than turkey.  Sometimes, myths are more fun than facts. The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth I surmise that the many of our Thanksgiving dinners were sites of spirited discussions regarding a recent political earthquake that convulsed this country.  Indeed, over the past 3 weeks, I have departed from this blog’s medical commentary, to offer some thoughts on what occurred and why. The nation is sorely divided, but I sense that there will be healing, depending upon everyone’s ability and willingness to listen deeply and absorb the views of reasonable folks whose opinions differs from ours.  Reasonable people ...

Let the whining begin!  Donald Trump, the president-elect, has chosen Mike Pompeo, Michael Flynn and Jeff Sessions to serve as CIA director, National Security Advisor and Attorney General respectively.  Here’s the shocker.  They are all conservative!  Let me offer some guidance to the demoralized and deflated liberal, I mean ‘progressive’, political left.  When the nation elects a president who resides to the right of the political center (leaving aside that where Trump truly resides is an arguable question), he is going to choose personnel who share his philosophy.  Trump ran hard on immigration, trade, anti-terrorism policy and the Supreme Court.  Now elected, he should be expected to assemble a team that will further the objectives that he campaigned on.  Isn’t this what we expect when a candidate gets elected? I think that Trump’s appointments mentioned above – all of whom are qualified – cause the left to hyperventilate in an effort ...

Many folks talked about the possibility of an October surprise prior to our recent presidential election.  Rumors swirled of an FBI bombshell, more WikiLeaks or a Russian hack attack.  The predictors were off by a month.  We received instead a November surprise that many view as apocalyptic.  The nation was shocked, as were the candidates, despite Trump’s minions’ confident public exhortations of victory.  How did the press and the punditocracy get it all wrong?   Even days prior to the election, many pollsters were placing Clinton’s chances of victory in the 75-90% range.  An Unexpected Guest We are beginning to understand how a man who has never held elective office, who by all accounts is a boorish and vulgar narcissist, could vanquish 17 Republican adversaries to gain the nomination and then handily trounce the Clinton political machine on November 8th.    The brash outsider prevailed over the consummate insider.   W...

Oftentimes, physicians and patients face bad options.  I wish that the choices that patients faced were all good ones, or at least had one option that was likely to yield a favorable result.   This scenario is further complicated as medicine is an uncertain discipline with moving goal posts and changing facts.  We make decisions and recommendations based on the current state of facts and our medical knowledge and experience.  We may counsel a patient against surgery, only to discover days later in retrospect that an operation would have been the right choice.  An adverse outcome may result from an excellent decision.  There are many medical circumstances when the options are equally foreboding.   A man may be suffering frequent episodes of angina, chest pain caused by hardening of the coronary arteries.  He is on maximal medical treatment, but the symptom persists.  This is not only limiting his life activities and pleasure, bu...