Dr. Andy

Reflections on medicine and biology among other things

Thursday, May 05, 2005

From last week's NEJM

a great first-person account of a doctor who has a patient dumped on her. I won't say more as I don't want to give it all away, but this kind of stuff happens all the time.

Free access, too

1 Comments:

At 9:03 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I do not understand what this doc is so upset about. He works in an urban hospital clinic, and his patient is getting the best available care. The patient is not getting the TLC she would get if she had the resources to have a primary physician who would have probably detected this mass when it was smaller, but that is not the situation that existed. The doc is upset that "they" did not tell this patient what was going on, but "they" is apparently a high volume ambulatory surgery clinic, where they could either take care of problems that they are well equipped and competent to deal with, or spend that time telling Ms. Ortega that there was an abnormality that will defer her surgery (which they did), and then spend a lot of time receiving and not being able to answer any of her questions, because they do not routinely manage a workup of this type. What most patients want is not to have their time wasted, and to get to where their problems can be addressed in the most efficient manner. That was done. Typical NEJM horse-hockey, wringing their hands over what they believe the rest of the world should do.

 

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