Medical training covers very little on how to confront dying and death with their patients and their families. Marketplace's Caitlan Carroll visits the San Diego Hospice and the Institute for Palliative Medicine, where they are training physicians on how to tailor care around patients' last wishes.
I was a bit torn when trying to figure out how to approach this piece. A reader emailed me about an article in the Huffington Post, and there is so much wrong with it that I felt overwhelmed. My solution is to focus on a few of the problems that can help illuminate broader points.
Everybody has worked with a jerk. Someone who steals credit for your work. Someone who berates their employees behind closed doors but turns on the smiles for the executives. Someone who is loathe to admit a mistake.
When that jerk is a physician, the consequences are steeper than bruised egos or misbegotten bonus pay. Patients can end up with the wrong medication. Surgery can be performed on the wrong organ. Someone who had an excellent chance at surviving a disease can be dead in seconds.
Last May was a big month for the Asian community. It was Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, but was also the National Hepatitis B Awareness Month.
The prevalence of hepatitis B among Asians Americans is stunningly high—15% compared to 0.5% for average Americans. So there were many educational workshops and screenings offered by various organizations and institutions in the community through the month.
If relative risk is the guy that drug companies always want to have at the party, absolute risk is the guy who never gets invited, the total buzz kill, the guy who showed up with someone’s cousin once in a bad outfit and ended up mumbling to himself in the corner about how everything would be better if people just listened to him.
Dr. Lipson writes his own blog called White Coat Underground, contributes and helps edit at Science-Based Medicine, and contributes to The Science Business Blog at Forbes.com where this piece originally appeared.
Part 2: Researchers trying to find why people with disease fail to act against it.
