Monthly Archives: October 2011

As we’re fond of reminding you here, the costs of medical malpractice don’t amount to a hill of beans when it comes to our health care spending. The legal fees and payouts from medical malpractice amount to 0.5% of our health care spending. It would be a great thing for the tens of thousands of [...]

In this week’s news were a couple of stories that I thought made neat medical malpractice hypotheticals. The first comes from a new research study showing that doctors who take so-called “smart drugs” (drugs that improve focus and concentration like ADHD drugs and anti-narcoleptic drug Modafinil) perform better than doctors who don’t. The study prompted [...]

Last week, The Wall Street Journal ran a chilling story on the prevalence of doctor-owned medical device companies and the conflicts of interest that arise when doctors are implanting medical devices whose sales they profit from. The heart of the story involved a 48-year old Baptist preacher named Gary Steven Moore. Moore died on the [...]

Today I was reading a great blog post over at KevinMD.com. Much of it had me nodding in agreement with the physician-blogger who wrote it. The blog post’s title was “Lawsuits Are More Of An Emotional Issue Than A Financial Issue” and the author made many sound points. As the author pointed out, it makes [...]

Dr, Atul Gawande, one of the heroes of this blog, has a great new article in The New Yorker on the importance of coaches in improving performance. As Dr. Gawande notes in his article, for the first several years after becoming a surgeon, the rate of complication in operations he performed declined — until he [...]