MD Whistleblower

First Customer Service Representative? Your call is important to us.  Please listen carefully because our options have changed. Reader query: During your current or any prior lifetime, has any phone menu option ever changed? I have more than once experienced an option not offered on the robotic phone menu option choices - a dead phone line after a 30 minute wait. Have you tried this customer plea as I have?  Could you pretty-please jot down my cell phone number in the event that we are disconnected?  Here are some of the responses one might expect from such in insolent request. • Are you joking? • I would but I think it's illegal. • Sorry, our phone bank only receives incoming calls. • No, but if you prefer, I can transfer your call to our grievance hotline. Just click on option #17. • Uproarious laughter from the entire phone bank who heard my request on speaker. As I write this, I am at 18,000 feet in a propeller plane that I trust will land safely in...

I’ve already written about the overuse of antibiotics in this country. This overutilization costs money and causes medical complications. It also is believed to be the cause of a new generation of superbugs, that can attack us with impunity as we may have no effective antibiotic to defend ourselves with. As an aside, I remember when I first learned the meaning of the word impunity. Here’s the opening paragraph from the short story written by a nineteenth century master. THE thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I gave utterance to a threat. AT LENGTH I would be avenged; this was a point definitively settled -- but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved precluded the idea of risk. I must not only punish, but punish with impunity. Without resorting to Google, can any readers name the work and the author? Digression o...

 One would think that a physician who earns his living billing patients would be conversant with the prices of his services. Not this doctor. I am queried periodically by patients asking how much I charge for a colonoscopy. Of course, every physician recognizes that this question is not phrased properly. It doesn’t matter what we charge; it’s what an insurance company determines we will be paid. I might believe that your colonoscopy was worth a thousand bucks, but those who pay the bill have a different sense of its value. Many ordinary folks think that we doctors can simply raise our prices to enrich ourselves. Physicians cannot do this. The hardware store and the supermarket can raise prices in response to rising overhead and market forces, but we physicians cannot. While I realize that the public does not sympathize with physicians who are lumped in with the 1%, a pejorative term popularized by the Occupy movement. The reality is that many private medical practices are struggling...

With regard to antibiotics, physicians and the public have each been enablers of the other. Patients want them and we doctors supply them. There’s nothing evil about this arrangement. Antibiotics are one of medicine’s towering achievements and have saved millions of lives. Shouldn’t we prescribe them to patients who need them? Of course we should. But why do we prescribe them to patients who don’t? Before you race to the comment section to accuse me of being a self-righteous preacher, realize that throughout this blog, I have confessed my own mistakes and shortcomings, and will continue to do so. (Yes, many commenters have enthusiastically assisted me in this effort.) So, when I throw a stone at the medical profession, I am also in the line of fire. I have since the heady days of medical internship, been a conservative practitioner, preserving my soul even after completing training where medical overtreatment was worshiped. In medicine, less is so much more. I wish that more patie...

Would you rather your physician be an astute diagnostician or a compassionate and empathic practitioner? Of course, we want our physicians to be blends of these qualities. We want it all.  We want them to be chimeras of Drs. House and Welby. But, is this possible? I can't say. I suspect that it is easier to cultivate soft bedside manners than it is to teach medical acumen, although the latter was the overriding priority when I was in medical training. No points were awarded in our morning reports with the chief of medicine for holding a patient's hand during the night. Big win, however, if the intern could recite 14 causes of hypercalcemia.  The message was that 'hard medicine' is what really matters. Where's the bedside manners site?  The importance of bedside manners depends upon the specific medical circumstance at hand.  Good bedside manners may mean less if you are going to see a physician once for a procedure than it would if the doctor-patient r...

During my college years, we loved the album Bat Out of Hell by Meat Loaf. We would wail along with Meat Loaf as he screamed out his passionate interpretation of Paradise by the Dashboard Lights. Another memorable song on that album was Two out of Three Ain’t Bad, which offers an important lesson to those of us interested in health care reform. No, Meat Loaf was not a medical policy wonk who offered health care solutions via allegory in his ballads. It’s the song title that caught me as I read yet another article on accountable care organizations (ACOs). Take a look at this banal 3 word description. Accountable Care Organization These new organizations have much more to do with accountability and organization than they do with care . In other words, Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad. ACOs are another coercive mechanism to track and compare physicians using quality metrics that are far removed from true medical quality measurements. As practicing physicians understand, and governmen...

Image Depicts Doctor'sWaiting Room Flow Plan On a prior posting, I opposed using secret shoppers to evaluation medical offices. I admit, however, that physicians’ office practices do need some healing. Patients who phone their doctor pray they will reach living breathing human beings, but often find themselves trapped in the expanding phone menu universe. Waiting room patient ‘flow’ can be stagnant. Getting medical records transferred, a reasonable and routine request, can test the mettle of even the most steeled and seasoned patients. Office staff, who are often multitasking machines, may be impatient with patients. I don’t need a secret shopper to make these diagnoses in my practice. We already know them and struggle to improve them. We have made progress where we could and tried to mitigate the damage when we couldn’t remedy a particular situation. Our most important resource of identifying our flaws is our patients. When they point out when we have missed the mark, they ...