Alert & Oriented

In his recent article “Feed Me, Pharma,” ProPublica’s Charles Ornstein has been calling attention to studies showing that the prescribing decisions of doctors are linked to the amount of money that drug companies can bestow on them, usually in the form of meals, travel expenses, tuition support to attend courses, and so on.

I find nothing surprising about that, and Ornstein need not be so scrupulous when he clarifies that “the researchers did not determine if there was a cause-and-effect relationship between payments and prescribing.” To deny that perks have a causal effect on physician behavior invites improbable considerations.

In fact, the data suggests that doctors are particularly easy to manipulate. One of the researchers interviewed by Ornstein was “surprised that it took so little of a signal and such a low value meal [to influence doctors]” A Chick-fil-A is all that it takes!Continue reading “The pharma-fed doctor”

I wish to make one clarification and one prediction regarding employed physicians.

The clarification is this:  There is a common misconception that if healthcare operated under free market conditions, it would primarily be a cottage industry of solo practices and of small physician-owned hospitals.  Such operations would not develop the capabilities of large healthcare entities that we commonly associate with central planning.

In reality, however, the opposite would be the case. Continue reading “In defense of the employed physician”

In a recent New England of Medicine article titled “Considering the Common Good—The View from Seven Miles Up,” Dr. Martin Shapiro tells a story that serves as a parable for a more general point:  Instead of only considering the best interests of individual patients, American physicians should adopt “a more communitarian approach to decision making” and consider “the implications of individual clinical decisions for other patients and society as a whole.”

The parable is as follows: two sick patients are aboard an airplane, each with his own physician.  The first one is terminally ill and on his way home; the second one has a grave illness but stands a small chance of surviving.  A decision to land midway must be made in flight, and it pits the interests of the one against those of the other.Continue reading “Practicing medicine for the common good”