FIRST Trial: Patients Not Harmed When Surgical Residents Work Flexible Hours
Patients had no greater risk of death or serious morbidity when cared for by surgical residents...
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Author: SkepticalScalpel
Is Burnout Talk Causing More Burnout?
Almost every day for the last few years, someone is writing about physician burnout or depression. The problems begin in medical school. A recent paper featured drawings that medical students had done depicting faculty as...
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Surgeon Convicted of Manslaughter Wins Right to Appeal
Last month, a three-judge panel granted English surgeon David Sellu the right to appeal his...
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Why Hospital Rankings are Bogus
The Leapfrog Group has announced its annual list of America’s top hospitals for quality and safety...
Read MoreThe Ultimate Resident Evaluation
It comes as no shock to me, and probably many other current and former program directors, that a recent study showed faculty overall performance evaluations of residents do not correlate with their scores on the yearly American...
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Mass. General Hospital on the Hot Seat
October was not a good month for Massachusetts General Hospital. A group of MGH anesthesiologists...
Read MoreBaffling Deficiency of New ICD-10 Codes
Many years in the creation and tens of thousands more codes than ICD-9, yet the new ICD-10 list may be inadequate. An actor was hospitalized after his foot became caught an elevator raising the stage during a performance of the...
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Two Ways to Deal with ED "Frequent Flyers"
A hospital in Maryland has come up with a novel solution for patients who are “frequent...
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Surgeon Scorecard Thoroughly Dismantled
Back in July, an organization called ProPublica released its Surgeon Scorecard, which attempted to...
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Is there a Nursing Shortage or Not?
Google “nursing shortage,” and the number of hits describing the current shortage will convince...
Read MoreState Medical Boards’ Questionable Behavior
A family physician was sanctioned by her state’s Board of Medicine for prescribing an antibiotic over the telephone in 2012. The incident occurred while the doctor was working for a telemedicine company. At that time,...
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After Poor Outcomes, Neurosurgeon Arrested for Assault
It’s time to catch up with America’s most notorious neurosurgeon, Dr. Christopher...
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Is the Surgeon Still “Captain of the Ship”?
A Kentucky appeals court recently ruled that a surgeon was not responsible for a burn caused by an...
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Woman Refuses Episiotomy, Gets One Anyway
A woman in California is suing her obstetrician because he performed an episiotomy that she had...
Read MoreThe Doctor Will Saw You Now
One of the biggest medical stories of last week involved an unusual case from Scotland. During the course of a leg amputation at Ayr Hospital in Scotland, the surgeon discovered a metal plate in the patient’s leg. Lacking the...
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Surgeons Who Can’t Perform Open Surgery
Now I’m really worried about surgical education. Here’s why: A friend told me that a...
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Alternative Medicine Docs Confused About Oxygen
An article called “Simple ‘4-7-8’ breathing trick can induce sleep in 60 seconds”...
Read MoreJournal Publishers’ Exorbitant Profit Margins
Many have written about who is making money in healthcare. Sure doctors do very well, but not as well as hospitals, hospital administrators, insurance companies and their corporate officers, drug companies, device manufacturers,...
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Wisconsin Bill: Cameras in the OR
A legislator in Wisconsin is proposing a bill that would require facilities to record both video...
Read MoreDo OR Checklists Improve Outcomes?
“Implementation of the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist was associated with robust reduction in morbidity and length of in-hospital stay and some reduction in mortality,” says the conclusion of a paper in the May 2015...
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