First, Do No Harm
To another doc. That’s how 45 percent responded, anyway.
Topics: medicine
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:20 pm on Monday, December 3, 2007
2 Responses to “First, Do No Harm”
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December 4th, 2007 at 11:31 am
And we wonder why medical costs are out of control….
I’m actually surprised at that last result. If only half of them answered the survey, that means more than 1,479 doctors didn’t inappropriately cash the check. Sending an incentive on the honor system is quite unusual. The normal practice is to send the incentive only to those who complete the survey (or else to send a token buck, intended to induce guilt, but with no strings attached). The instruction about the incentive may not have been perfectly clear. (There is a joke in here somewhere about non-compliance, but I’m too lazy to find it….)
I would be interested in seeing the data on how many people in other professions are willing to rat out their colleagues. It’s apples and oranges, of course, given the nature of the medical profession vs. most others, but still, I suspect that the number of those who have ever said anything about a known misdeed by a colleague is much lower for most of our fields than the number shown here.
December 4th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
“covering colleague ass” is very often an important part of medical protocol.
Not to mention legal protocol.
unnecessary and expensive MRI scan
The numbers of MRI/CT scans performed have jumped by orders of magnitude in recent years.
A very large number (maybe up to a third) of the millions upon millions performed each year are utterly useless. And (in the case of CT) significantly exposing people to ionizing radiation.
Besides promising to keep (the sick) from “harm and injustice”, Hippocrates promised to teach the art of medicine “without fee and covenant”.
Many modern medical schools conduct graduation exercises with a rewritten and “modernized” version of the Oath.