Category: Health care

Why the Harvard Business Review was wrong about patients

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 34 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas    ♥  @HeartSisters

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Maybe it’s because I’m not a physician, a nurse or any other type of health care provider. Maybe it’s because I’m merely a dull-witted heart attack survivor. Maybe it’s because I spent virtually all of my 35+ year professional career in the field of public relations. But the reality is that I seem to think about health care more like a marketer than the average person might, and as such, I’ve been puzzled for some time about recent quality of care debates on whether patients should be considered “consumers” or not.

In one debate camp, you have doctors like Dr. Atul Gawande, whose Big Med article in The New Yorker caused apoplectic sputtering among some of his colleagues when it was published last August.  That’s because Dr. Gawande touted a national restaurant chain as a potential model of the kind of standardization and quality that have been so lacking in health care.   Continue reading “Why the Harvard Business Review was wrong about patients” →

“Live a healthy life, then die quickly at 90”

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 8 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas    ♥  @HeartSisters

woman funny oldYou’d hardly expect a physician who spends his life trying to cure cancer to suddenly shift gears and suggest that maybe, just maybe, we should “stop trying”. But it turns out that New Jersey oncologist Dr. James Salwitz agrees with a review of data published in the September 2012 issue of Lancet Oncology, entitled “First Do No Harm: Counting the Cost of Chasing Drug Efficacy.” *

An accompanying Lancet editorial suggests that during the 10 years between 2000 and 2010, “many new cancer drugs produced marginal extensions in survival and simultaneously increased risk of treatment-associated death and side effects.”  This compelled Dr. Salwitz to write:    Continue reading ““Live a healthy life, then die quickly at 90”” →

Why don’t patients take their meds as prescribed?

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 23 Comments

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by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

Compliant is one of those words that makes my skin crawl. It’s the word that our doctors use to describe good patients who take their prescribed medications exactly as ordered. The Teenage Cancer Trust’s Simon Davies in the U.K. once described the C-word (and its ever-so-slightly less patronizing alternative adherent) as words that “sound like they have punishment at the end of them.”

But for most physicians, both words mean the same thing: a serious health care issue. That’s because when patients refuse or stop taking the medicine their doctors have prescribed to help manage a serious medical condition, the consequences are often devastating.  From organ transplant recipients to those living with chronic diagnoses like diabetes, heart disease, epilepsy, HIV or Hepatitis C, those consequences can be swift and sometimes even fatal.  Continue reading “Why don’t patients take their meds as prescribed?” →

When you fear being labelled a “difficult” patient

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 29 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥  @HeartSisters

We arrive early for our doctor’s appointment. We wait patiently. We sit across from the doctor, and we nod and smile politely during our visit. We pick up the prescription for our meds and then we walk out the door to make room for the next patient waiting.

And sometimes we do this even when the discussion about our health care leaves us with unspoken concerns or unanswered questions. Most patients know what this feels like, so it’s reassuring to learn that academics are actually studying it: our fear of being labelled a “difficult patient”.  Continue reading “When you fear being labelled a “difficult” patient” →