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, but also significantly increases his risk of a heart att
MD Whistleblower presents vignettes and commentaries on the medical profession. We peek 'behind the medical curtain' and deliver candor and controversy in every post.