Word: patients
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Doctors live with denials, some of them dangerous. I've ordered MRI's on hospitalized patients that somehow never got done, physical therapy and medication never delivered, because of "unmet requirements" picked up when codes are scanned. When the white blood count isn't high enough to "justify" the hospitalization for IV antibiotics, the physician whose judgment says "this patient is sick and belongs in the hospital" is told his services as well as the hospitalization will not be paid for. When a doctor is convinced a test or treatment is needed, (and his patient doesn't have the money...
Finally, the political debate also revolves around using information technology to figure out which treatments are most effective. This seems eminently sensible: might certain heart patients, for example, do just as well with clot-busting drugs as with more expensive angioplasty procedures? The drug route could save about $7000 a patient Crunching huge amounts of data from a wide cross section of patients could help us do better research than we are doing now. But what will happen when the new computerized research turns up a treatment that works a little better but costs much more? Will they tell...
Before we had them on every countertop, computers held such promise for us in medicine: doctors and patients live in a world of painful, pressing questions, the answers might be in there. Or so we thought. Twenty nine years from the night I first sat in a hospital in front of a computer screen the questions persist. And I still don't see the profit-maximizing, cost-controlling physician with his nationwide computer treating patients any better than the great physicians I've known have. With pen and paper, personal commitment to each patient and judgment born of practical experience...
Faith heals all right, but it is debatable whether the faith has to be religious. Total faith in a doctor also eases pain and accelerates recovery. Perhaps it is the persevering faith of the patient and not God or the doctor that actually heals. Maheshkumar Mathilakath, SHARJAH, U.A.E...
...think the Republican Party needs to fundamentally change what it stands for, but it needs to take those principles and apply them. For example, everybody should be able to afford high-quality health care, but we should want that to be between a patient and their doctor, not a bureaucrat...