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Showing posts from August, 2010

Electronic medical records, revisited

Last night I realized that I actually do like having a computerized medical record system. I have had a love hate relationship with our computerized medical record system since we adopted it in January of 2007.  We decided to make all of our records and billing electronic in 2006 and tried out several systems before deciding on General Electric's Centricity product.  It was expensive, over $100,000 for our 9 physician group, not including the loss in production as we learned how to use it, and not including many of the laptops and desktops and printers and other hardware. When the system "went live" we all slowed our history taking and record keeping to a snail's pace and were hard pressed to see half as many patients as we had before the system was in place. We all stayed late and came in early. Eventually we adjusted to it, and after a year, we were not as fast, but almost as fast as we had been before. We lost 2 physicians who really couldn't deal with it and...

Estrogen: the pendulum swings again

The following essay addresses the present tendency of scientific medicine to rely heavily on studies which address the effects of treatments on populations rather than individuals.  It has been clear, always, before and after various large scale studies of the effectiveness of estrogen, that hormone therapy is good for some people and not good for others. Nevertheless, at great cost to patients in money and time and quality of life, we have at various times pronounced estrogen to be good either for everyone or for no one. When the Woman's Health Initiative study was stopped in 2002 due to increase heart attacks and breast cancer in the women treated with estrogen and progesterone the non-medical press circulated the story extremely effectively, and within a year very few women did not know that the estrogen they had been prescribed and told would save them from all sorts of misery was actually toxic and evil.  It was a bad year for estrogen. In the 8 years since then...