Doctor-Patient Relationship

August 9, 2018

For sick seniors, hospitals and nursing homes can be nothing but bad news

In many parts of the developing world, families play a big part in patients’ hospital care. They not only sit for long hours with loved ones, supporting and encouraging their recovery. They also may help with direct services, bathing and cleaning patients, tending to their beds and quarters, and even assisting with their medications and treatments.

Such attentiveness from loved ones— once common in this country, too — may be deemed by many now as quaint and unnecessary, what with the rise of big, shiny, expensive American hospitals.

But think again: As Paula Span reported in her New York Times column on “The New Old Age,” care-giving institutions across the country have become such stressful, disruptive places that seniors, especially, not only heal poorly in them but also may be launched into a downward cycle of repeat admissions.

July 27, 2018

Wrestler scandal fuels rising concern on how schools, teams protect kids

by Patrick A. Malone

Soon, many young people will be back to school and signing up for sports teams. Many will have to undergo physical exams before they can play. And it’s a tragic reality that grown-ups may need to think a lot how to protect young people from sexual predators who also are doctors.

That’s because Ohio State University, sadly, has joined the University of Southern California, Michigan State-USA Gymnastics, and Penn State University in the notoriety of dealing with a sexual abuse scandal involving adults and students. In the case of the Buckeyes, it’s Big Ten male wrestlers.

OSU said it had hired an outside law firm to investigate the allegations against Richard Strauss, who had blue-chip credentials and served as the team doctor to university wrestlers roughly from 1979 to 1997. The doctor killed himself in 2005. Lawyers interviewed more than 200 one-time OSU students, with 100 of them accusing Strauss of sexual misconduct, “including former athletes from 14 different sports teams.”

June 7, 2018

Stigma inflicts harsh toll on mentally ill, but society pays too

by Patrick A. Malone

Although Americans keep making progress toward ending the stigma associated with mental disorders, including trying to put public funding for the diseases’ treatment on a more even footing, patients with serious mental illness suffer unfairly and harshly still due to their conditions.

Dhruv Khullar, a doctor at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and a researcher at the Weill Cornell Department of Healthcare Policy and Research, has written a painful piece for the “Upshot,” an evidence-based column for the New York Times. His article, “The Largest Health Disparity We Don’t Talk About,” reports that:

Americans with depression, bipolar disorder or other serious mental illnesses die 15 to 30 years younge r than those without mental illness — a disparity larger than for race, ethnicity, geography or socioeconomic status. It’s a gap, unlike many others, that has been growing, but it receives considerably less academic study or public attention. The extraordinary life expectancy gains of the past half-century [for most in this country] have left these patients behind, with the result that Americans with serious mental illness live shorter lives than those in many of the world’s poorest countries.

May 20, 2018

Dangerous doctors rip off Medicare, creep out coeds, harm transplant patients

by Patrick A. Malone

Callous institutional inertia can allow dangerous doctors to keep harming patients. But media digging deserves credit for raising needed alarms when professional caregivers and others fail to step up to protect individuals as disparate as taxpayers, seniors, coeds, and heart transplant recipients.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and MedPage Today performed a public service, reporting that they found more than 200 doctors nationwide who surrendered a license, had one revoked, or were excluded from state-paid health care rolls in the previous five years but somehow remained on the federal Medicare rolls in 2015.

This meant the problem doctors could keep bad practices afloat, in part because Uncle Sam ─ that’s taxpayers like you and me ─ paid these hundreds of MDs $25.8 million to care for seniors, among the nation’s most vulnerable patients.

April 27, 2018

Doctors must give patients more help with medical uncertainty and complexity

by Patrick A. Malone

Although Americans may love to wager on ponies, lotteries, and even church bingo games, they’re getting restive and confused about playing the odds with their health — and doctors need to step up their game a lot to help patients better cope with medical uncertainties.

Dhruv Khullar, a physician at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and a researcher at the Weill Cornell Department of Healthcare Policy and Research, has written an excellent piece for the New York Times’ evidence-driven “Upshot” column, detailing a modern, thorny part of doctor-patient relationships:

Medicine’s decades-long march toward patient autonomy means patients are often now asked to make the hard decisions — to weigh trade-offs, to grapple with how their values suggest one path over another. This is particularly true when medical science doesn’t offer a clear answer: Doctors encourage patients to decide where evidence is weak, while making strong recommendations when evidence is robust. But should we be doing the opposite? Research suggests that physicians’ recommendations powerfully influence how patients weigh their choices, and that while almost all patients want to know their options, most want their doctor to make the final decision. The greater the uncertainty, the more support they want — but the less likely they are to receive it.

April 19, 2018

Retail clinics are booming, but can’t be a cheaper cure-all for patient needs

by Patrick A. Malone

Americans are showing with their feet and their money how they feel about doctors’ offices and shiny hospitals, places they’re shunning more and more. They’re racing to neighborhood clinics and urgent care centers that seem to be popping up on every suburban street corner and shopping mall.

Before these facilities transform U.S. health care, would it be worth asking what this trend might mean, not just for profit-seeking retailers, drug store chains, and, yes, also hospitals and doctors who are shifting into new lines of business?

The New York Times found that:

April 1, 2018

Why are some ER doctors refusing to give stroke patients ‘brain-saving’ care?

by Patrick A. Malone

It’s no April Fool joke: Emergency doctors across the country, according to the New York Times, have been defying widely accepted standards of care and withholding a drug that rigorous clinical trials and medical specialists long have recommended for stroke victims.

Administration of the drug, tPA or tissue plasminogen activator, helps to prevent brain injury after a stroke by dissolving the blood clot and opening up the blocked vessel. Neurologists and neurosurgeons as well as cardiologists, have campaigned for its aggressive use within hours after the onset of symptoms. Indeed, hospitals nationwide have adopted speedy stroke care, including with tPA, under slogans like “Time is Brain.”

The drug’s fast use has become so accepted, the capacity to administer it is a keystone for hospitals to receive a much-sought designation as specialized stroke treatment centers. And though it has long been thought that tPA needed to be given within three or four hours from the start of stroke symptoms, new research funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke has opened the strong possibility that many more patients could benefit from tPA and neurosurgery within 16 or even 24 hours after suffering a stroke.

March 29, 2018

High-tech advances? They may prod you to get your medical records, asap

by Patrick A. Malone

Although enthusiasts still wax on about how technology will improve lives, patients may want to be wary about purported advances that may end up complicating and even compromising crucial parts of their medical care — including how their medical records are kept and how payers decide if they’re covered.

Let’s start with some kudos for dumpster-diving doctors in Canada who discovered flaws in hospitals’ disposal of supposedly confidential and legally protected patient health records. They went around unidentified facilities collecting from various bins a half ton of paper that doctors, nurses, and hospitals were ready to toss.

After examining the piles of paper, they found most private records had been properly handled. But thousands of documents also were not: They were improperly disposed of, and contained identifying or confidential patient treatment information, the researchers found. Though Canada’s patient privacy laws differ from those in the United States, they agree that patient health records must be guarded, and the researchers found violations of practice, policy, and potentially privacy laws.

March 11, 2018

Diabetics caught up in medical experts’ dispute over key blood sugar metric

by Patrick A. Malone

What are patients supposed to do when medical experts feud over key disease metrics like the optimal blood sugar level for diabetics?

Here we go again, figuring out medical figures: That’s because the American College of Physicians and the American Diabetes Association are tussling over the much-watched blood sugar test — the hemoglobin A1c. It’s also known just as the A1C or the HbA1c, or glycohemoglobin test.

As the Mayo Clinic describes the A1C, it “reflects your average blood sugar level for the past two to three months. Specifically, the A1C test measures what percentage of your hemoglobin — a protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen — is coated with sugar (glycated). The higher your A1C level, the poorer your blood sugar control and the higher your risk of diabetes complications.”

March 9, 2018

Why are doctors operating, needlessly and so often, on frail seniors?

by Patrick A. Malone

Although patient advocates long have pressed Big Medicine to eliminate unnecessary care — waste in the health care system that some experts estimate adds as much as $765 billion annually in needless costs — it may be past due for a public condemnation of a notably extreme example of this practice: The all too frequent, unhelpful surgeries for the old, many of whom are at the end of life.

Liz Szabo of the independent, nonprofit Kaiser Health News Service, and National Public Radio deserve credit for their report, detailing how 1 in 3 Medicare patients undergoes a serious procedure, “even though the evidence shows that many are more likely to be harmed than to benefit from it.”

As the story explains: