Can Good Doctors Be Bad for Your Health?
nytimes.com
Can Good Doctors Be Bad for Your Health?
1–10 of 73 posts
Re: Can Good Doctors Be Bad for Your Health?
#2Very bad title: it implicitly equates "Good Doctors" with "famous doctors" rather than with "doctors whose actions benefit patients". The real point of the article is that one should ask questions and be personally involved in care decisions, rather than just taking the doctor's word. But the linkbait headline obfuscates that point.
Re: Can Good Doctors Be Bad for Your Health?
#340% of people eating dark chocolate got hit by lightning.
Come on people. No more statistics.
Re: Can Good Doctors Be Bad for Your Health?
#4Very bad title: it implicitly equates "Good Doctors" with "famous doctors" rather than with "doctors whose actions benefit patients". The real point of the article is that one should ask questions and be personally involved in care decisions, rather than just taking the doctor's word. But the linkbait headline obfuscates that point.
[deleted]
Re: Can Good Doctors Be Bad for Your Health?
#540% of people eating dark chocolate got hit by lightning. Come on people. No more statistics.
The problem with the statistic you bring up is that it lacks context like what percentage of the general population eats dark chocolate. If only 20% of the population eats dark chocolate then it's a very interesting statistic.
When I look at the article I don't see any crimes against statistics, and I'd be curious what statistic you think is contextless or misrepresentative.
Re: Can Good Doctors Be Bad for Your Health?
#6Very bad title: it implicitly equates "Good Doctors" with "famous doctors" rather than with "doctors whose actions benefit patients". The real point of the article is that one should ask questions and be personally involved in care decisions, rather than just taking the doctor's word. But the linkbait headline obfuscates that point.
The article uses "best" and "senior" as well, more often than "famous", and explains that the data refers to times when "the senior cardiologists were out of town" (anyone attending conventions, for example.)
It's unlikely there are enough "famous" cardiologists alone to have accounted for "tens of thousands" of admissions. If so, the meaning of "famous" is downgraded to those who are sufficiently senior, rather than how we usually think of "famous."
Re: Can Good Doctors Be Bad for Your Health?
#7> Despite often repeating the mantra “First, do no harm,” doctors have difficulty with doing less — even nothing. We find it hard to refrain from trying another drug, blood test, imaging study or surgery.
It's disappointing that the conflict-of-interest is not better recognized. Asking a surgeon if you need surgery? Do you really expect a person under a pile of medical-school debt to give you an unbiased answer?
Re: Can Good Doctors Be Bad for Your Health?
#8Very bad title: it implicitly equates "Good Doctors" with "famous doctors" rather than with "doctors whose actions benefit patients". The real point of the article is that one should ask questions and be personally involved in care decisions, rather than just taking the doctor's word. But the linkbait headline obfuscates that point.
Hmm, I think I disagree.
It was pretty obvious to me that when they used the term "good doctor" they meant better by some objective criteria that many people use as a proxy for "doctor whose actions benefit patients". If "good doctor" had meant "doctor whose actions benefit patients" it would be a contradiction that most would-be readers could dismiss.
Re: Can Good Doctors Be Bad for Your Health?
#9Very bad title: it implicitly equates "Good Doctors" with "famous doctors" rather than with "doctors whose actions benefit patients". The real point of the article is that one should ask questions and be personally involved in care decisions, rather than just taking the doctor's word. But the linkbait headline obfuscates that point.
The authors suggest it is due to a reduced number of unnecessary treatments:
>"Our results echo paradoxical findings documented during a labor strike by Israeli physicians in 2000, in which hundreds of thousands of outpatient visits and elective surgical procedures were cancelled, but by many accounts mortality rates dramatically fell during the year.27 Similar reports of decreased mortality during physician labor strikes exist elsewhere, with most hypotheses attributing mortality declines to lower rates of nonurgent surgical procedures.28"
http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=20389...
However, they do not seem to consider that mortality rates are seasonal and so are the meeting dates. The seasonality differs for different causes of death. A quick search came up with this for heart-related causes, so for example:
>"When grouped by season, we observed the distribution of the 449 coronary heart disease fatalities to show a relative peak in winter (32%) and relative nadir in spring (21%)."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3756551/
What they should have done is plot mortality by week so we can see if there is a sudden dip around the conference dates.
Re: Can Good Doctors Be Bad for Your Health?
#10Maybe when the top doctors are away at meetings the sickest patients no longer get transferred to the tertiary center for care and are kept at the local hospitals.