Why is American health care so expensive?

  Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been on the edge of my consciousness as a great hope for solving many of the problems in clinical medicine for maybe a decade. In 2011 IBM created a program...

http://whyisamericanhealthcaresoexpensive.blogspot.com/2024/01/ai-what-it-can-and-cant-do-for-medicine.html

The earliest cases of the novel coronavirus seem to have been in Hubei Province, in the city of Wuhan in China, possibly in November of 2019. The virus shares a family name with other more commo...

http://whyisamericanhealthcaresoexpensive.blogspot.com/2023/03/guess-who-finally-got-covid.html

I have been working at CHAS Health, a community clinic serving Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho for a little over 3 years now. This is a different experience for me than my prior 35 years o...

http://whyisamericanhealthcaresoexpensive.blogspot.com/2023/01/nurse-practitioner-scope-of-practice.html

In the JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) there are occasionally amazingly interesting snippets of information, not long enough to be articles, written as letters. In the early J...

http://whyisamericanhealthcaresoexpensive.blogspot.com/2022/07/why-are-new-drugs-so-expensive-absurdly.html

On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that provided women with a legal basis for a right to get an abortion. (Full text of opinion and dissent here --pay at...

http://whyisamericanhealthcaresoexpensive.blogspot.com/2022/06/we-need-to-talk-about-abortion-roe-v.html

I have been a practicing physician since finishing medical school in 1986. The year after that, I started my internship at the Johns Hopkins Hospital on the Osler medical service. I remember h...

http://whyisamericanhealthcaresoexpensive.blogspot.com/2022/05/physician-retirement-questions-thoughts.html

It was a beautiful early spring day. I was working in a little patch of native plants, clearing away some pine needles and pulling dandelions. It was pretty much perfect weed picking soil, moist ...

http://whyisamericanhealthcaresoexpensive.blogspot.com/2022/04/i-broke-some-ribs.html

Happy 2022--let it be filled with good things. And on that note, I wrote a poem. (After reading Manifesto of Encouragement by Danielle LaPorte) Even now   All is not lost-- even now ...

http://whyisamericanhealthcaresoexpensive.blogspot.com/2022/01/poem-for-new-year.html

I've noticed that when I'm at work, I generally love my patients. I may have complaints about them, wish they would behave differently, get frustrated with their choices, but I do feel a warm co...

http://whyisamericanhealthcaresoexpensive.blogspot.com/2021/12/an-opinion-love-your-neighbor.html

  I've been writing a few things about the climate at the other place, https://doctorjanicesblog.org/. Just thought I'd mirror those here. Since I last mentioned the climate in this blog, the...

http://whyisamericanhealthcaresoexpensive.blogspot.com/2021/11/a-little-view-of-climate-and-other-blog.html

What I do most and what I do best is medicine. Healthcare. So I began to write (this blog was created in 2009) as I saw the compassionate practice of medicine being threatened by a system that ha...

http://whyisamericanhealthcaresoexpensive.blogspot.com/2021/10/why-i-havent-been-writing-much-climate.html

  Lately there has been quite a heated controversy about whether to use ivermectin for Covid-19.  The FDA , a US federal agency responsible for providing unbiased information to protect peo...

http://whyisamericanhealthcaresoexpensive.blogspot.com/2021/09/ivermectin-for-covid-does-it-work-we.html

I just heard a talk by Kimberly Manning MD, Associate Professor of Medicine as well as the Associate Vice Chair of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Emory University School of Medicine, depa...

http://whyisamericanhealthcaresoexpensive.blogspot.com/2021/05/racism-structural-racism-and-wonderful.html

  In early March 2020 I began to write posts about Covid 19. There were few places that people could get good information that addressed the big picture and made it possible to understand what...

http://whyisamericanhealthcaresoexpensive.blogspot.com/2021/04/covid-re-evaluated-one-year-later.html

In my present job in a low cost health clinic I don't see much acute Covid. Patients in the infectious stage of the coronavirus are dangerous to everyone they breathe on and potentially infectio...

http://whyisamericanhealthcaresoexpensive.blogspot.com/2021/01/post-covid-19-syndrome-dying-of-covid.html

I've been thinking about police violence, crime, the criminal justice system and its horrors, racial barriers to success, fear and racism in general. It's been a busy few days as I've tried to e...

http://whyisamericanhealthcaresoexpensive.blogspot.com/2020/06/what-to-do-about-system-that-promotes.html

I have recently become aware that some people are mistakenly getting suspicious that Covid 19 death counts are an overestimate. That is probably because the numbers are awful and very hard to ...

http://whyisamericanhealthcaresoexpensive.blogspot.com/2020/06/people-still-arent-getting-it-death.html

I am not especially qualified to write on the subject of racism or the militarization of policing or how the criminal justice system perpetuates poverty and loss of opportunity based on race. I...

http://whyisamericanhealthcaresoexpensive.blogspot.com/2020/06/in-solidarity-with-people-protesting.html

It is 2 weeks since Governor Brad Little of Idaho issued a statewide "STAY AT HOME" order and about 3 weeks since my little town has been staying at home because of an earlier mayor's order. Th...

http://whyisamericanhealthcaresoexpensive.blogspot.com/2020/04/covid-19-quarantine-are-we-afraid-of.html

This morning the total number of deaths in the US from Covid-19 was said to be 994. That sounds kind of low, since influenza has already killed 30,000 this season. In the places where coronavir...

http://whyisamericanhealthcaresoexpensive.blogspot.com/2020/03/covid-19-and-death-rates-doctors-know.html

When we are all trying to avoid deadly spread of coronavirus infections, CAN WE STILL HAVE SEX? This is a GREAT question. Luckily the New York City department of health has answered this and ...

http://whyisamericanhealthcaresoexpensive.blogspot.com/2020/03/sex-in-time-of-covid-19.html

Idaho has 42 cases of Covid-19 as of this morning. It feels like nothing, but that's because very few people are being tested and we are on the leading edge of the exponential growth curve. Som...

http://whyisamericanhealthcaresoexpensive.blogspot.com/2020/03/things-everybody-should-know-about.html

We doctors are worrying about shortages of personal protective equipment. PPE is what we call it. When we see a patient with a disease that could be transmitted to others, we wear things that c...

http://whyisamericanhealthcaresoexpensive.blogspot.com/2020/03/ppe-personal-protective-equipment-how.html

In and around town there are people who are looking at all of the rest of us who are hand sanitizing and social distancing like we are crazy. I feel for them. They are simply trusting their own e...

http://whyisamericanhealthcaresoexpensive.blogspot.com/2020/03/covid-19-why-does-it-seem-like-nothing.html

Still vigorously healthy, thank you. I sneezed once yesterday afternoon and my voice was just a wee bit gravelly. Today my nose runs when I'm out in the cold. It always does that. No exposures ...

http://whyisamericanhealthcaresoexpensive.blogspot.com/2020/03/covid19-can-we-really-just-drop.html