Wellness is about making lots of good choices over time. We need to make these choices more evident, concise, and the consequences of them easier to understand.
In the latest advance for health care accountability, the country’s leading hospital accreditation board, the Joint Commission, released a list on Tuesday of 405 medical centers that have been the most diligent in following protocols to treat conditions like heart attack and pneumonia. Almost without exception, most highly regarded hospitals in the United States, from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., did not make the list.
The Joint Commission list omitted the Cleveland Clinic; Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston; Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C.; Ronald Reagan U.C.L.A. Medical Center; and the University of California San Francisco Medical Center, among others. It did not include a single hospital in New York City, or the most prominent centers in Chicago and Houston.
The safest and most effective hospitals aren’t always what you think. Many of the nation’s “top” hospitals think their reputation allows them to do whatever they want, when, in the end, the evidence now suggests you’ll get higher quality, safer care at your local no-name hospital.
Insightful post by Jay Parkinson about Steve Jobs’ illness and striking the balance between aggressive interventions and doing nothing.
The irony is that no industry needs a Steve Jobs more than healthcare. Someone with the vision to turn what were once impossible feats due to their complexity into beautiful, intimate, and deceivingly simplistic experiences. Imagine if a hospital, clinic, treatment plan, or cycle of care were designed to his standards?
The problem with extra-special treatment in our healthcare system is that it almost always means more care than anyone else would get. For example, celebrities often get every test imaginable done on them in order to rule absolutely everything out. A hospital doesn’t want to be known as the one that killed Lindsay Lohan. This of course leads to more tests and sometimes, more procedures. More procedures can often equal more complications. You get the deal. One hundred thousand people in America die every year due to medical mistakes, unnecessary surgeries, hospital-acquired infections, and drug complications…
…Steve Jobs’ had an incidentaloma. It may have taken this tumor 15 or 20 years to cause symptoms. However, it may have taken 1 month. We won’t ever know. We do know that incidentalomas sometimes simply go away without rhyme or reason. And we do know that, in Jobs’ case, the doctors intervened with two major surgeries and, now, 8 years later, his health is severely compromised. Maybe if his doctors actually did nothing for him, he’d still be just fine today. There’s no real way to know. …
We were able to notify displaced patients via Twitter on where to acquire medications. These ‘tweets’ immediately spread through patients’ networks, and consequently most could attend to their essential treatments.
– BBC News - Twitter ‘vital’ link to patients, say doctors in Japan (via bijan) Via Jay Parkinson + MD + MPH = a doctor in NYCAccording to a recent survey of U.S. physicians, 61 percent intend to own an iPhone by the end of 2011. This is up from 39 percent at the beginning of the year and compares with the iPhone’s 24.7 percent adoption among general U.S. smartphone users.
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
– Ira Glass (via nefffy) Via NPR Fresh AirAs if there was actually more evidence needed that vaccines don’t cause autism, the 1998 British study that linked autism to childhood vaccines was recently discovered to be an elaborate fraud. Not just incorrect, a fraud.
A disrespectful, stressful social environment is a neurotoxin for the brain and psyche, and the scars are permanent.
Awesome. Google Earth for your body.
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