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Showing posts from July, 2018

Overachievers on a plane

"If there is a physician on the plane, please press your call light!" The vast majority of doctors who have flown on airplanes have heard this, and most of us are willing, if not entirely eager, to respond. What follows is usually a far from ideal encounter with inadequate information, too much noise, a cramped space to work in and little knowledge of what is expected or even possible. My experiences (I think there have been 3) were people who had become dizzy or had passed out. One of them was pretty frail, but none required that we land before our destination airport. What I learned was that: 1. More than one physician usually responds to these calls. As a general internist, I'm usually the most appropriate person to evaluate the patient (winning out over ophthalmologists, dermatologists and obstetricians.) 2. The flight attendants are very grateful, bring me an extra glass of juice and promise some kind of compensation from the airline which may or may not ma

Dang. Just have to rant about some really expensive drugs: Lucemyra, Trelegy Ellipta and Andexxa.

The price of new drugs just seems to go up. I've stopped being excited about innovative pharmaceuticals that target various hard to treat diseases and conditions, simply because they cost so horribly much. Each of these new developments looks like a classic philosophical dilemma. Do I pull the lever that makes the trolley kill one person instead of 5 or do I save the one and allow the trolley to kill 5? Do I prescribe the new drug that potentially helps my patient but may destine a whole population to lousy health care by making the overall budget unsupportable? When I was in residency in the 1980's medication that cost a dollar a pill was crazy expensive. Inflation doubles that plus a little more, so think $2.25 and pill in 2018 money. But today's expensive medication costs 10-20 dollars a pill. Or $1000 a pill for the drug to cure hepatitis C. Or, in the case of a now pretty commonly used drug for advanced cancer, $150,000 a year. This is real money. On the lower end,