This just in: Medical school is reaaaalllly expensive.
Think about that before you apply.
That is all.
Archive for the 'Medicine' Category
I love it when other people do the work for me.
Hoover discusses this recent Jama article concerning residency work hours:
Nearly half of all months had violations during ambulatory settings and nearly 62% of months had violations where interns were working on inpatient services.
The ACGME needs to start cracking some balls if they want programs to take these duty restrictions seriously. If nothing is done, or programs are simply slapped on the wrist, the system will continue to be abused and work hour restrictions will be nothing more than fudged numbers on some slip of paper in the program director’s office.
I had mentioned in a previous comment that residency training is an odd bird. This work hour issue is one of those oddities.
Of course, I come from a fairly benign medical school–at least as far as the medicine program is concerned. I never heard much in the way of complaints about work hours from the residents I rotated with. Surgery is another issue…those poor bastards were miserable.
At any rate, who decided it was a good idea to keep people for 30 hours every 3rd night? Or 4th night? Or even 6th night for that matter? Musta been a bunch of military folks…
I’ve never read a single thing that Dr. Atul Gawande has written–and he’s written plenty. His resume includes two books, 30 columns for Slate, and numerous articles for the New Yorker. He’s also a Rhodes Scholar and a graduate of Harvard Medical School. Of course, he is a surgeon–so that’s at least one strike against him. But I digress.
The New York Times has a nice profile of Dr. Gawande this week which conveniently coincides with the release of his second book, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Perfomance. It is an interesting read and gives pretty good insight to the life of such an accomplished and respected surgeon.
It’s the final paragraph, though, that makes me wonder if I’ve missed out on something by never reading Dr. Gawande’s work:
Pulling out his Blackberry, he said, “It seems like there’s a story in every nook and cranny of medicine,†and scrolling down a list of 106 ideas he’d saved, he picked a few. “Itching,†he said. “Nobody really understands what it is. Chernobyl. Twenty years on, what really happened there? Why weren’t there as many cancer cases as we predicted? And here’s a good one: why, if we have so many health-policy experts in this country, do we have such bad health policy?â€
Maybe I’ll go and pick up his next book.
If there is anything more boring in medicine than watching someone else be an anesthesiologist–I’d like to know about it.
Talk about boring…sheesh.
It is very difficult to bag-mask a patient when he has a hole in his cheek.
That is all.
