My lede:
Increased scrutiny of the potential conflicts of interest posed when physicians accept gifts and payments from industry — combined with greater pay disclosure and a sputtering pharmaceutical pipeline — have led to a significant drop in doctors’ financial ties to drugmakers.
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My lede:
The more hours surgeons work each week, the more depressed and burned out they are, according to newly published survey data.
Surgeons working 80 hours or more a week had the most problems. Nearly 40% reported being depressed, and more than 10% said they made a major medical error in the last three months, said the study, published in the November Journal of the American College of Surgeons. Nearly two-thirds of the surgeons who worked 80 hours a week said they had conflicts between work and personal obligations in the last three weeks.
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Well, after my recent TV appearance, it is only natural to follow up by broadening my media reach to include the world of books.
A January 2009 feature article I wrote for American Medical News, “Redefining death: A new ethical dilemma,” is included in a new textbook issued by Greenhaven Press. The book, “Bioethics in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” is part of the publisher’s “Social Issues in Literature” series aimed at high-school students and is meant to be a companion for when they read the novel.
The book is broken into three sections — one with background about Shelley, the second featuring commentaries on bioethical issues in the novel, and the third highlighting “contemporary perspectives on bioethics.” That third section is where my story on transplant physicians pushing the boundaries of what constitutes death comes in. Greenhaven sent me a complimentary copy of the book, and perhaps this will push me to actually read the Shelley classic.
The important thing to note is that my prose may now potentially help educate America’s youth — a frightening prospect, indeed. This is almost as scary as when one of my articles — about a poll on physicians’ views of doctor-assisted suicide — was cited by a Montana judge in her opinion (page 22) granting terminally ill patients in that state the constitutional right to physician-aided death. Alarmingly, my sphere of influence is growing ever wider.
My lede:
Choosing treatments for patients who cannot do so for themselves puts surrogate decision-makers in an unenviable position. The situation requires that physicians navigate a careful path in offering recommendations while respecting surrogates’ and patients’ wishes, according to two recent medical journal articles.
“Data have shown that the stress of being a surrogate decision-maker is equivalent to the kind of scores people get on psychological instruments when their house just burned down,” said Daniel P. Sulmasy, MD, PhD, co-author of a Nov. 3 commentary on surrogate decision-making in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
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My lede:
Pharmaceutical promotion through drug rep visits, medical journal advertisements and company-sponsored meetings rarely results in higher-quality prescribing, according to a systematic review published in the October PLoS Medicine.
“The big news here is that many physicians deny that they are influenced by information from pharmaceutical companies, and yet we found many studies where there was an association between promotion and the physician’s prescribing,” said Dr. Geoffrey Spurling, senior lecturer at the University of Queensland School of Medicine in Brisbane, Australia. “Physicians need to realize that they are not invulnerable to persuasion techniques.”
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My lede:
The New York City burial site of the nation’s first black medical degree-holder received a new headstone — one provided by his white descendants in a recent public ceremony.
Dr. James McCune Smith received his medical degree at the University of Glasgow in Scotland in 1837, forced to go overseas for his education due to U.S. colleges’ racist admissions policies. Historians say the training provided at European medical schools at that time was, ironically, superior to that offered in the U.S.
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Five hospitals following best practices have cut their number of fumbled transfers by more than half.
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My lede:
Performing surgery on the wrong body part — or, worse yet, the wrong patient — is the kind of mistake physicians agree should never happen.
A series of reports from hospitals documenting how these devastating errors slip through the cracks prompted the Joint Commission in 2004 to mandate a three-step protocol. It required physicians and other health professionals to perform a pre-procedure verification process, mark the correct site for the procedure and conduct a “timeout” discussion as a final check before the procedure begins.
Yet new evidence shows the commission’s “universal protocol” has not stopped wrong procedures.
In fact, the number of wrong-patient and wrong-site procedure reports rose, according to a study of more than 27,370 adverse events self-reported by Colorado physicians and published in the October Archives of Surgery. The study found that 132 wrong-patient and wrong-site procedures were voluntarily reported to the Colorado Physician Insurance Co. from 2002 to 2008, with peak annual numbers of reports for both categories occurring after the commission’s protocol was required.
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My lede:
Implementing a comprehensive set of infection control measures can cut the incidence of Clostridium difficile significantly, according to a study presented at the American College of Gastroenterology’s annual meeting.
Integris Baptist Medical Center in Oklahoma City was able to cut its C. diff rate by 40%, from 11.3 per 10,000 admissions to 6.9, in three months after forming a multidisciplinary “war on C. diff” committee to devise and implement infection prevention measures.
The infection occurs nearly 500,000 times annually in hospitals and nursing homes. The national C. diff rate is 13 per 10,000 admissions, and about 30,000 people die each year of the disease in health care facilities, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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