[Reblog] The legacy of Dr. Michael Davidson (murdered in his office)

The comments about physicians/health care industry were overwhelmingly thought provoking and insightful.
Some excerpts from the comments…

• What we as a profession appear to be (willfully) unaware of is that we doctors are the face of the healthcare system. To the extent that we do not speak up, protest and advocate for our patients when they are taken advantage of by hospitals and insurers, we provide a face for patients to blame.
• This did not happen in a vacuum. It happened in a culture where there is a lot of rage, sometimes uncontrolled, and easy access to guns. And it happened in a very broken healthcare system which is driven by greedy big business profit motive that results in anyone with money or good insurance getting very overtreated and anyone without money or good insurance getting severely undertreated. And yes, our system has bred a lot of mistrust and hopelessness.
• “Anyone who doesn’t think that corporate executives and hospital administrators take full advantage of the opportunity to hide behind us as they maximize profits at the expense of our patients, is a fool.”

The legacy of Dr. Michael Davidson.

From the 22 January 2015 post at KevinMD

In 1994, I was working at my first radiation oncology job in San Diego at Grossmont Hospital when I came into work to hear disturbing news.  One of my colleagues in medical oncology, a compassionate man known for his gentle nature, had stayed late at the cancer center the evening before to finish up paperwork.  With his back to his ever open door, he sat at his desk never once considering that he was in danger.  A disgruntled relative of a former patient surprised him from behind and beat him viciously over the head and body causing broken bones and contusions, and leaving him for dead.

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Read the entire article, with comments here.

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Data for Individual Health | Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality (AHRQ)

Data for Individual Health | Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality (AHRQ).

From the press release

 

And that is the way it is

[News article] Corruption of health care delivery system? — ScienceDaily

Corruption of health care delivery system? — ScienceDaily.

From the 14 October 2014 article

he foundation of evidence-based research has eroded and the trend must be reversed so patients and clinicians can make wise shared decisions about their health, say Dartmouth researchers in the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes.

Drs. Glyn Elwyn and Elliott Fisher of The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice are authors of the report in which they highlight five major problems set against a backdrop of “obvious corruption.” There is a dearth of transparent research and a low quality of evidence synthesis. The difficulty of obtaining research funding for comparative effectiveness studies is directly related to the prominence of industry-supported trials: “finance dictates the activity.”

The pharmaceutical industry has influenced medical research in its favor by selective reporting, targeted educational efforts, and incentivizing prescriber behavior that influences how medicine is practiced, the researchers say. The pharmaceutical industry has also spent billions of dollars in direct-to-consumer advertising and has created new disease labels, so-called disease-mongering, and by promoting the use of drugs to address spurious predictions.

Another problem with such studies is publication bias, where results of trials that fail to demonstrate an effect remain unpublished, but trials where the results are demonstrated are quickly published and promoted.

…

English: Example of promotional “freebies” given to physicians by pharmaceutical companies (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

The authors offer possible solutions:

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