Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do residency slots mandate public funding? Aren't they doing actual useful work same as regular doctors? (albiet with a higher error rate) So they could be funded through via charging for services rendered. Of course their effective pay may be close to zero, after malpractice insurance, but it will still attract some number of med school grads who can't get in otherwise.
Residency slots don't mandate public funding. The majority of funding comes through the Medicare program but private foundations also contribute some. Private payers (insurance companies) also indirectly subsidize residency slots by paying teaching hospitals higher rates. Some services performed by residents are billable, especially the more experienced ones. But the programs as a whole run at a loss after accounting…
The darker side of being a doctor (2017)
411–420 of 521 posts
Re: The darker side of being a doctor (2017)
#412Sunk cost fallacy is what keeps these doctors stuck. They get addicted to the lifestyle, income, and prestige after years low on the totem pole. The workload seems manageable until the reality of boundaries being crossed involves having to choose. We only have 24 hours in a day.
This is not just a medical industry issue. The tech industry is inherently prone to burnout when potential rewards can exceed even that of a doctor. I know too many stories of drug-induced burnout while trying to keep up a certain lifestyle. We all have a choice, and we need to check in with ourselves to make sure we are not losing more than we gain.
Re: The darker side of being a doctor (2017)
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like technology could very easily solve this eventually
If you find some problem that plagues millions of very smart people, and your thought is "technology could very easily solve this", the first thing you should ask yourself is what you're missing.
Re: The darker side of being a doctor (2017)
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
They choose more money over avoiding burnout.
You took the words right out of my mouth! Money is the elephant in the room here. Why doesn't the author quit surgery and start a small GP clinic? Oh, only half the pay? I see similar behaviour in law firms and investment banking.
Re: The darker side of being a doctor (2017)
#415I don't understand why doctors that are entering the field need to be over-staffed and over-worked. I have a cousin who is an Er surgeon and she needs works 3 days a week, but that certainly was not the case when she was starting out. The work culture of the medical profession looks horribly inefficient. What benefit do you get from buying out young doctors?
Another thing is the toxic culture perpetuated for allowing medicos to stroke their egos - toxic cultures about overtime are everywhere, but medical profession is a class apart.
Re: The darker side of being a doctor (2017)
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it comes down to, if you read the history of the American Medical Association, that some doctors simply didn’t like a free market pushing down prices for their services.
Yeah, but why is the same situation present, and the same explanation given, in Poland, EU? Or, seeing from other comments, plenty other countries around the world? I'm seconding 'viraptor here - this isn't a good enough explanation. It doesn't stand up to scrutiny, and doesn't mesh well with day-to-day experience. Individual doctors I know seem to have very little influence over anything, and they're first in line t…
Re: The darker side of being a doctor (2017)
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
What a weird way to frame the problem. Why not increase the supply of doctors instead of reducing demand, whatever that means?
> Why not increase the supply of doctors instead of reducing demand, whatever that means? Because that's not sustainable. We can't throw unlimited human resources at health care. We have other issues and societal problems to focus on. We can only create so many doctors, because its expensive to lock down a smart and ambitious mind for so many years. Opening up healthcare for free for old people is like opening up an…
Re: The darker side of being a doctor (2017)
#418It’s time to open more med schools and accept more doctors. Telling me a 27 instead of a 26 on the mcat makes you somehow a way better doctor is nonsense.
Re: The darker side of being a doctor (2017)
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
Residency slots don't mandate public funding. The majority of funding comes through the Medicare program but private foundations also contribute some. Private payers (insurance companies) also indirectly subsidize residency slots by paying teaching hospitals higher rates. Some services performed by residents are billable, especially the more experienced ones. But the programs as a whole run at a loss after accounting…
Presumably it will only happen in hospitals that charge high enough rates to fully cover the cost of overhead, I.e at one of those luxury hospitals
Re: The darker side of being a doctor (2017)
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you find some problem that plagues millions of very smart people, and your thought is "technology could very easily solve this", the first thing you should ask yourself is what you're missing.
The problems are aversion to technology in places, unwillingness to adopt new (human) protocol/processes, entrenched proprietary technology, that does not adhere to standardized formats. Say you want to save a report for a patient for the next shift. That report needs to enter a computer system. If there is a system for that, it will most likely be a very expensive overpriced proprietary solution with expensive suppo…
It is not. This is a classic example of assuming the problem exists within the realm of your current understanding.
The stereotype of people in medical roles not wanting/liking/understanding technology is wrong. What we don't like is the god awful technology we are handed because the work hasn't been done to understand how we work. THAT technology is not worth learning or caring about.
As someone who has rounded patients over many times, the problem is the extensive amount of information that is ingested into establishing a cohesive clinical picture of a patient, then continually adjusting the degree of confidence in numerous facets and levels of the case. Then it all gets dumped into the heads of the next group of people.
So people in tech develop these programs to help track the information. Yet they fail to grasp that there are many situations where the conclusions are based on a web of contingencies that operate on disparate time series, are affected by a wide net of things not directly reflected in empirical data, and it is completely impractical for me to continuously update the intermediate changes to my conclusions just so your software can know what's going on. The more that people try to construct a UI that captures the complexity of what can be noted in a case, the less usable it becomes. Even then, they still undershoot the level of depth needed to reflect what doctors are tracking in their heads. You may think it's enough to have someone input the hematologic data as the results and their ranges. You fail to track that my interpretation of those results is contextualized by the fact that nurse Martha was on the floor and likely dropped the ball on how promptly the ABG was run, and that certain staffing dynamics affected how much weight I give certain subjective criteria. In rounds, a simple eyebrow raise can be enough to convey to the next shift a mutually known dynamic that affects how information should be interpreted. Asking us to spell all of that out in your "new technology solution" won't happen. It is a waste of everyone's time and social dynamics will prohibit it.
I could go on and on with a variety of other examples, but I don't have the time or desire to do so. My point is that the tech hubris is wasted effort. While you sit there thinking you need to teach the "tech illiterate doctors" how to follow matters of process, we see you as someone that has been asked to develop a more effective tool, and you hand us a fisher-price screwdriver and insult us for not finding it useful.
Like the other comment said, https://xkcd.com/1831/