Fighting this Fight for a Long Time
I recently received this image from a doctor (Greg Miller, MD) who has followed me since the Placebo Journal Days. This article from some journal came out in 2003. Wow, I have been fighting for doctors to take care of themselves for decades. I guess I thought things were bad then and that was before EHRs, quality metrics, prior authorizations, etc. What is nice, though, is that my advice is still relevant for doctors today.
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That article is a bunch of s#!t. I did primary care, mainly geriatrics and had to take hospital call, do hospital practice and work in the office. If one is doing that, there is hardly any leisure time PERIOD! I retired at age 64 as I got tired of call, had guardianship of a mentally handicapped adult son and my wife died of radon induced lung cancer and she didn’t smoke a single cigarette in her life. Our owner built house had a radon problem and neither of us knew it was a problem in this area. I had 3 months to say good bye. Worked a couple of years longer took COBRA insurance and bailed out.
Am a lot happier now and don’t miss practicing one iota! Practicing medicine like that is for young people.
Oh about pay disparities between female and male physicians. That is all SMOKE AND MIRRORS d@mmit! I knew some women primary care docs who worked harder than me and they rightly were paid more!! I knew many who spent more time with their “families” and were RIGHTLY paid less as they didn’t practice as much as me. Many docs are paid on production so it would be expected that female docs that don’t work as hard get paid less! Let’s put this nonsense to rest.
The onslaught of technocracy was well on the way by 2003, and is older than most of the readers; in fact, their parents and grandparents too. There is a culture of external purpose that is inimical to medicine in particular. Medicine cannot be practiced in this way. The EMS predated this article by decades, but its toxicity arose when the purpose of the chart ceased being a tool for the physician, and the physician, a tool for producing charts. How do “we” discriminate between good and bad physicians? The simple answer was that a good physician excels at that which physicians do; find and treat disease and by that method and others, benefit the patient. Now, there is a myth that by reporting a stochastic ragbag of meaningless statistics to “them,” then they can draw from these things some eigenvalue of measurement. That is what has changed here and elsewhere. That is why what was once called “notes” became the idol known as the Chart, which the Law requires all manner of unwanted gifts be laid at its altar and consecrated, usefulness be damned. The more medicine becomes The Chart, the more clear it becomes that no special skill is needed to stuff it. Any “provider” can do it. Medicine without humans is neither humane, nor even medicine.
Sooooooo…. The solution in 2003 was to spend a whole 25 hrs and 15 min with your family every month?!?!
Where does it say that?