This month theme issue editor, Trahern Jones, a fourth-year student at Mayo Medical School in Rochester, Minnesota, spoke with Dr. Edward Laskowski about the use of performance-enhancing drugs and substances among athletes today.
Publicizing physician ordering information as a way of peer-pressuring hospital employees into cutting costs is likely to have unintended consequences.
William Martinez, MD, MS and Thomas H. Gallagher, MD
Running away from the problems and inefficiencies of our current health care system and into the comforts of concierge medicine does little to advance health and well-being for the vast majority of people.
The use of coded patient data for reimbursement purposes can tempt clinicians to exaggerate the severity of the patient's condition, skewing the accuracy of the data and interfering with clinical decision support and research.
Registries of those considered dangerous focus wrongly on those with mental illness, who account for only 4 percent of violent acts committed in the United States.
Rachel O. Reid, MD, MS and Ateev Mehrotra, MD, MPH
An effective policy regarding retail clinics in a primary care practice should address patients' need for timely and convenient acute care and build capacity for enhanced access to acute care within the primary care clinic itself.
Physicians are not obligated to offer testing or treatments that are not medically indicated—even if patients demand them. This does not mean, however, that a physician should be dismissive of the patient’s concerns.
Karen E. Hoffman, MD, MHSc, MPH and Paul L. Nguyen, MD
Guidelines require interpretation and should not be mindlessly applied as a template of care for all patients, particularly when there are inconsistencies between clinical practice guidelines developed by medical groups.
Health information technology, like prior technological advances in medicine, can improve patient care and enhance the patient-physician relationship if used properly and thoughtfully.