3 Tips to Get to Know Your Doctor
Here is a USA Weekend piece on the type of advice I give in Critical Decisions – how to make stronger connections with your doctor.
My colleagues and I have been doing lots of research lately on how physicians and patients discuss out-of-pocket expenses during clinic encounters. One of our recent publications has been getting lots of attention, with this being the latest example. I thought I would share it with you: Recent qualitative findings published in Health Affairs showed that physicians…
Here is a link to an article I co-authored in the New England Journal this week, with Yousuf Zafar and Amy Abernethy. In the article, we urge physicians to talk about out-of-pocket costs with patients, given that these costs can sometimes have a bigger negative impact on their lives than the kind of treatment side…
Q: Much of the debate around health care reform has centered on whether the government or the individual will control health care decisions. Is that a valid argument? Most medical decisions are between clinicians and their patients, and will continue to be that way as the federal health reform law is implemented. Medicare bureaucrats aren’t…
The first test tube baby was born July 25th, 1978 in the north of England. Louise Brown was called the “baby of the century” by some and a “moral abomination” by others. It wasn’t Brown who critics accused of being immoral, of course. She was just a blameless infant. Instead, it was her doctors who…
In her deservedly best-selling book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot reproduces the language of Lacks’s informed consent document when she was about to undergoing her cancer surgery at Johns Hopkins in 1951: I hereby give consent to the staff of the Johns Hopkins Hospital to perform any operative procedures and under any anesthetic…
At long last, my new book Critical Decisions is out there, ready to reach (fingers crossed!) a wide and appreciative audience. I’m really excited about this book. It pulls together ideas that have been smoldering in my brain for two decades — research, reflections and experiences (AKA “stories”). In the book, I relate the fascinating…