Monthly Archives: June 2011

As reported by The Washington Post, a new report by a hospital accreditation body estimates that so-called wrong site surgeries take place 40 times each week in the nation’s hospitals. Wrong site surgeries are operations that take place on the wrong part of the body, such as amputations of healthy limbs, back surgeries that are [...]

The Massachusetts legislature is weighing a bill that would give patients the right to have their surgery videotaped if they paid for the recording. Hospitals that refused to allow videotaping would face a $10,000 fine. The bill had a hearing Tuesday before the Public Health Commission. Personally, I think that in many surgeries the videos [...]

Autopsies are a routine part of hospital deaths, right? Well, actually, no. Today autopsies are only performed in five percent of hospital deaths, down from over sixty percent 40 years ago. As the incomparable philosopher/economist Robin Hanson notes at Overcomingbias.com, would we let it slide if only five percent of airline crashes were investigated? Hanson [...]

If you had asked me last week to define “nocturnist,” I would’ve guessed, “A musical composer who writes nocturnes. For example, Chopin or Debussey.” But, as Kaiser Health News reports, a nocturnist is actually a member of a new medical specialty – a doctor who works exclusively nights at a hospital. You can think of [...]

We all know that failing to take medicine as prescribed adds to the costs of our health care. For example, when someone fails to take a course of antibiotics to the end of the bottle and their infection flares back up, requiring another trip back to the doctor, that makes health care more expensive. And [...]