Author: MarkH
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Improving medical care—arrogant doctors are a distractor
(Tangentially related podcast here) Here’s the thing: all this talk about arrogance in medicine is a red herring. It’s distracting us from the real question that we should all be asking: how do we improve quality medical care? The personality of individual physicians is important, but not very, just as the medical mistakes of individuals…
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Choosing a medical specialty III – applying, interviewing and matching
Aside from taking 4th year medical school classes it’s also the time of year that medical students who plan to graduate in 2009 (like me) are applying to residency programs across the country. This is an interesting process and one that many people outside of medicine are unfamiliar with, and quite surprised by. For one,…
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Credulous medical reporting
Science and medicine reporting is hard. In this space we’ve dealt with some of the problems that arise when “generalist” reporters try to “do” science and medicine. And now, CNN has shut down its science unit. Given the increasing complexity of medical and scientific knowledge, this is very bad news. As a fine example of…
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H. influenzae—it ain’t the flu, but it’s still pretty cool
This was first posted at Science-Based Medicine on Monday, but I can’t seem to keep myself from cross-posting. –PalMD I’ve been thinking about an interesting organism lately, an organism that illustrates some basic principles in science-based medicine. The organism is called Haemophilus influenzae (H flu), a gram-negative bacterium discovered in the late 19th century. H…
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Obama Meets With Gore, Rejects Denial
It seems Obama didn’t get Nisbet’s memo. Just watching on CNN, future president Obama says: The time for delay is over, the time for denial is over. We all believe what the scientists have been telling us for years now, that this is a matter of urgency and national security and it has to be…
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Terrorism denialism
I was reading two articles on disparate subjects and found them oddly linked in my mind. The first former terrorist Bill Ayers’ explanation of why he didn’t respond when Obama was smeared by association and the second P. Michael Conn and James V. Parker writing for the WaPo about the escalation in recent years of…
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Why am I here again?
Perhaps because I don’t blog anonymously, or maybe for other reasons, I don’t write that much about my personal life. That kind of writing can be self-important, insipid, and boring. But it can also have real power. A number of the anonymous bloggers here describe the intersection of the scientific life and family life with…