Archive for January, 2008

Physician Report Cards and the Designated Driver

Monday, January 28th, 2008

A new study in the February 2008 issue of the American Heart Journal shows that cardiologists in New York State are less willing to aggressively treat patients with severe heart attacks than cardiologists in other states, and that the mortality of these patients is significantly higher in New York. The authors of the report […]

Posted in General Rationing Issues | 8 Comments »

How Important Is Cholesterol, Really?

Thursday, January 24th, 2008

In addition to being the Rabble-Rouser-In-Chief for this fine blog and its groundbreaking parent website, DrRich for several years has also been the cardiology expert at About.com. (About.com is a New York Times company, but since his association with About.com predates that of the NYT, DrRich sincerely hopes that his more conservative readers will […]

Posted in Cardiology Topics | 3 Comments »

Why Canadians and Other More Advanced Civilizations Should Root Against U.S. Healthcare Reform

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008

Michael Moore, Hillary Clinton, and other Wonkonians find it relatively easy to find both Canadian officials and regular Canadian folks (invariably healthy-looking ones, likely innocent of ever having needed serious medical care) who are willing to publicly extol to us Americans the innate superiority of their government-controlled, universal healthcare system, and to urge us to […]

Posted in Wonkonian Rationing | 2 Comments »

Another Sign of the End-Times for the Doctor-Patient Relationship

Wednesday, January 16th, 2008

A feel-good story in the Philadelphia Inquirer does not make DrRich feel good.
The story extols a local (to Philadelphia) start-up company called Verilogue. Verilogue places digital audio recorders in the offices of physicians, and “captures every word” of the doctor-patient encounter. Verilogue then processes these conversations, appropriately scrubbing them of identifiers, and places them into […]

Posted in General Rationing Issues, Primary Care in America | 5 Comments »

John Edwards and the Distribution of Livers

Thursday, January 10th, 2008

DrRich has not yet decided who he will support in this year’s presidential election. Whoever he ends up supporting, though, it will not be because he admires their policy on healthcare. No candidate from either party even begins to approach the fundamental problem facing our healthcare system, which is (of course), rationing, and how best […]

Posted in General Rationing Issues | 4 Comments »

On the Transcendant Importance of Retainer Medicine

Friday, January 4th, 2008

For the last week or more, DB has been conducting a lively give-and-take over at DB’s Medical Rants on the topic of retainer medicine. DrRich urges his readers who may have missed this ongoing exchange to take some minutes to acquaint themselves with it.
DB has offered a studied and persuasive apology (in the Platonic sense, […]

Posted in General Rationing Issues, New business models for healthcare, Primary Care in America | 5 Comments »

Sudden Death Is Still the Healthcare System’s Friend

Thursday, January 3rd, 2008

In an article published in the January 3 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers report that hospitalized patients who have cardiac arrest (sudden loss of cardiac function due to the onset of a heart arrhythmia known as ventricular fibrillation) are often not receiving defibrillation (an electrical shock delivered to the chest) within […]

Posted in General Rationing Issues | 7 Comments »