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…
In my statistics class many moons ago, we were taught that as statistical measures, surveys were at the bottom of the heap of ways to establish meaningful evidence. It was implied that if anyone in the class planned to use surveys in their studies, he or she would be laughed out of the classroom. So…
Much of the loud clamoring about the recently passed stimulus health-care provision targets “comparative effectiveness research.” Steven Pearlstein of The Washington Post notes the criticism comes mostly from those with a conservative perspective who believe, or at least profess to believe, that “the market” is supposed to magically keep costs down and health care, like…
Dr. Scott Gottlieb’s title of his op-ed column in The Wall Street Journal, “Congress Wants to Restrict Drug Access,” is misleading, not by what it says, but by what it doesn’t say. Dr. Gottlieb does talk about how research on effectiveness of drugs will lead to restriction on what drugs a patient may get, and…
