Dr. Jeffrey Parks is a board certified general surgeon working in Cleveland who writes regularly at Buckeye Surgeon.
The Nobel prize winning NGO Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has published a widely circulated white paper detailing “experiments” conducted by physicians and other medical personnel on detainees at Guantanamo. Read the paper. It’s a grisly, soul-sapping compendium of state-sanctioned, state-organized human experimentation. Remember those OLC torture memos that war criminals John Yoo and Jay […]
I’ve been struggling lately with the raison d’etre of my blog, Buckeye Surgeon. I tend to write about a variety of topics, usually medically related, but it seems the best posts have been the ones based on actual patient encounters in my practice. And I’ve been wrestling with the significance of that fact to such […]
Munck Wilson Mandala Partner Greg Howison shared his perspective on some of the legal ramifications around AI, IP, connected devices and the data they generate, in response to emailed questions.
From the AMA: Student debt statistics *$156,456 – According to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), the average educational debt of indebted graduates of the class of 2009. *79 percent of graduates have debt of at least $100,000. *58 precent of graduates have debt of at least $150,000. *87 percent of graduating medical students carry […]
Health care reform needs to pass. I’m sorry. It just has to. This transcends politics and ideology and all the other BS we have to listen to on FoxNews and CNN. It’s become one of the defining moral issues of our time (along with the torture scandal, of course.) This article from the NY Times […]
It’s worth your while to browse through Sid Schwab’s sampler one rainy Saturday afternoon when you get a chance. The old man can write. I was reading through a couple of his old posts the other day when I stumbled upon this one. It’s a shorter post (for him) but very powerful and moving. He […]
The must read health care policy piece so far this year is this one from Dr. Jerome Groopman in the NY Review of Books. I’m not kidding. You have to read the whole thing. The article is about “comparative effectiveness research” (CER from here on out) as applied to the field of medicine. Using best […]
At the Abarca Forward conference earlier this year, George Van Antwerp, managing director at Deloitte, discussed how social determinants of health and a personalized member experience can improve medication adherence and health outcomes.
One of the arguments for work hour reform is this idea that residents spend too much time doing scut. But Dr. Jeffrey Parks points out that there's value in scut. "You find yourself seeing things and experiencing events that change you fundamentally. Little things like chatting with an elderly man while you wheel him down to CT scan, making small talk, learning about him as a human being, rather than simply a name on the list."