I was once a factory-farmed physician. Then I escaped.
Six years ago I left my job and invited my community to design an ideal medical clinic. Thousands of physicians nationwide have created similar ideal, patient-centered practices.
Would we ever go back? Nope. Never. But from what did we actually escape? I hosted an “antonym contest” among hundreds of free-range physicians to find out.
What’s the reverse of patient-centered care? What’s the opposite of an ideal clinic? Here’s what docs who got away report they’ll never try again:
- Cattle Car Clinic
- Doc-in-a-Box
- Meat Market Medicine
- McHealthcare
- Jiffy Lube
- Premature Consultation
- Primarily Don’t Care Provider
- Read more & click here for winner!
I celebrate my innovative colleagues who are demonstrating daily that it is possible to care for patients–and ourselves.
Pamela
This is great for the LAUGHTER YOGA that has many medicinal benefits!
HMO’s at their finest. In the early eighties, I was having trouble with my knee that had been reconstructed about five years before. There is a scar about six inches long slashed across my knee and at that time it was still a bright red, but long since healed. I had to see my primary care doc to get a referral. He visited me in the examining room and took one look at my knee and said, “There’s no record of surgery in your files.” I (being a smart-mouth) couldn’t control my disbelief at the comment and said, “What did you think it was, a sewing accident?” He just glared and wrote the referral.
Psychiatry, psychodynamic analytic that is, is even worse. With the medical schools totally passive, and choosing medical students who relate to patients as their cadaver, what can we expect. As Eisenhower said, “Beware the military-industrical complex”. Who listens?
Pamela, you have my nomination for “best sense of humor” around. I am so nauseated by the American medical model, that I try to completely ignore it. I am refreshed and delighted that you have found a proactive way to deal with it. PAMELA ROCKS!!
I sure hope you disconnected, from my rendition of “The Medical Mafia” these clowns have and will, kill you along with the pharmeceutical companies as their primary “hit men” I would love to go black ops on their asses and wipe them off the face of the map. I dont mean that in a mean way though!! LOL.
Ps. I would love to blog with you but you would find my stuff very repugnant, everything I say about medicine and all the rest is true and I will not recind any of my comments, nor try to make anything I feel strongly about more palatable to the average goyem!!
Your friend M Mcdonald
from the
Ashtanga Gita
With the pincers of truth I have plucked
From the dark corners of my heart
The thorn of many judgments.
I sit in my own splendor.
Wealth or pleasure,
Duty or discrimination,
Duality or non-duality,
What are they to me?
What is yesterday?
Tomorrow,
Or today?
What is space?
Or eternity?
I sit in my own radiance.
What is the Self?
Or the not Self?
What is thinking,
Or not thinking?
What is good or evil?
I sit in my own splendor.
I sit in my own radiance,
And I have no fear.
Waking,
Dreaming,
Sleeping,
What are they to me?
Or even ecstasy?
What is far or near,
Outside or inside,
Gross or subtle?
I sit in my own splendor.
Dissolving the mind,
Or the highest meditation,
The world and all its works,
Life or death,
What are they to me?
I sit in my own radiance.
Why talk of wisdom,
The three ends of life,
Or oneness?
Why talk of these!
Now I live in my heart.
The old man is dying, and there is no need to help it survive any more. The old man is on the deathbed don’t mourn for it help it to die. Because only with the death of the old can the new be born. The cessation of the old is the beginning of the new.
My message to humanity is a new man. Less than that won’t do. Not something modified, not something continuous with the past, but utterly discontinuous.
Man has lived up to now not truly, not authentically; man has lived a very pseudo life. Man has lived in great pathology, man has lived in great disease. And there is no need to live in this pathology we can come out of the prison, because the prison is made by our own hands. We are in the prison because we have decided to be in the prison, because we have believed that the prison is not a prison but our home.
The fundamental problem is the unlink of control of a process from the responsibility of that same process. The engine that is driving this destructive tyranny is the public demand of something for nothing/less than market value and the lying politicians who promise to deliver that non sustainable expectation …all in a society where over half the voting population pay little/no federal income tax but clamor for more and more ineffective unconstitutional government programs that are being paid for by legal plunder of a tax paying dwindling minority, the ones who don’t have the means to escape as international citizens.
Most patients seem to view their health insurance as a prepaid health care plan. It is not. Such views, while unrealistic, are an understandable response to a system in which freedom, the ability to chose, is actually being taken away from individual. For instance, an individual has no say in the matter of whether he/she can opt in/out of Medicare, the same program that the Federal senators and congresspersons have conveniently allowed themselves not to be a part of (rather they prefer their elaborate health care plan, payed by the tax payer, which is granted lifelong even only after a few years of “service”).
The original version of the Constitution, not the version that has been modified by both major political parties to expand their own political power, makes no mention of government being involved in health care. However, if the society in which I now live is clamoring for more such government involvement, unconstitutional though it may be, then I offer the five point proposal listed below. This is the summation of my experiences of being involved in acute care, chronic care, hospital based practice, solo practice, multispecialty clinics, administrative medical director as well as my front line interaction and observation of medical clinics in both communistic and socialistic countries. In addition, it is based on the experiences of both friends and families that have been both physicians and patients in communistic and socialistic countries. At this point, I would probably include the U.S. in the latter category. For those who think that fee for service is synonymous with a free market it definitely is not. The fee for service system in the U.S. is more akin to a command economy.
So, my counter offer is:
IF THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES WANT UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE THEN THE ONLY WAY WE ARE GOING TO HAVE AN ETHICALLY VIABLE AND ECONOMICALLY REALISTIC SYSTEM IS TO:
1)MAKE THE POLITICAL LEADERS WALK THE TALK-I.E. THEY MUST HAVE THE SAME BENEFITS THAT THEY ARE FORCING UPON THE GENERAL POPULATION,
2)ALLOW ALL UNITED STATES CITIZENS AND TAX PAYING LEGAL RESIDENTS TO GET A TAX DEDUCTION/CREDIT FOR THE PREMIUM OF THE HEALTH INSURANCE POLICY OF THAT INDIVIDUAL’S CHOICE,
3)ALLOW ALL UNITED STATES CITIZENS AND TAX PAYING LEGAL RESIDENTS TO GET A HEALTH SAVINGS ACCOUNT,
4)ALLOW ALL UNITED STATES HEALTH CARE PROVIDERS TO GET A TAX DEDUCTION/CREDIT FOR THE CHARITY HEALTH CARE THEY PROVIDE IN OR ON THE UNITED STATES, ITS TERRITORIAL WATERS OR AIRSPACE AND
5)HAVE TRUTH IN PRICING-I.E. TELL THE CUSTOMER, THE PATIENT, THE ACTUAL COSTS OF GOODS AND SERVICES PRIOR TO PURCHASE IN NON-EMERGENT SITUATIONS.
Bravo, I agree with you. Our health ”care” is a joke nowadays, it seems simply a means of decreasing the population. Isn’t there an ethical/ moral code oath all doctors have to take before they ever treat patients?
Yes. Physicians take an oath, but young medical students are often unaware of the dehumanization process involved in medical training and practice. To provide health care, we must have healthy doctors who are not victimized and traumatized by their training and workplace.