Note: Even back in 1992 when we wrote Modern Medicine, the focus of patient care had become the patient’s chart, not the patient. Because there were no longer enough ward clerks to do the paperwork on a hospital floor, the nurses had to do it—at the expense of attending to patients. Can’t say whether…
In Modern Medicine: What You’re Dying to Know, we talked about the high cost of technology because this was about the time hospitals were jumping on the MRI bandwagon. Some readers may remember the brouhaha over the cost of MRI machines when they first became available to hospitals. In our book we addressed seven notions…
In the early days of developing expert systems, there was a lot of talk about whether such systems should be built from the top down or the bottom up. The artifical intelligence focus has moved on to other perspectives, including the ever popular neural networks. In these discussions, we seem to forget an underlying principle…
When we wrote Modern Medicine: What You’re Dying to Know all those years ago, we concentrated on explaining how we thought health care costs had been forced into a never-ending spiral upward. Even then, our perspective was that the physician-patient relationship had been destroyed by the intervention of third-party interests. Much of the perceived crisis…
When I choose to call this blog “The Treating Physician,” I was attempting to remind readers that health care decisions should be the province of the patient and the physician. Indeed, that was the crux of the book Dr. Lindemann and I wrote 20 years ago, Modern Medicine: What You’re Dying to Know. Currently, there…
