Benevolent Payor

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?

jayparkinsonmd:

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. …