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The AARP just met with the leadership of the Mayo Clinic, one of the most outstanding medical institutions in the country. They provide excellent care at a cost that is less than most other parts of the healthcare system - and with improved outcomes. We asked them about their secret to success. Mayo has an electronic medical record and all their patients have their information online. The physicians are on salary, so there's no incentive to order unnecessary tests or procedures, and Mayo has an ethic of patient-centered care, with a long history of attracting the best people and rewarding them. If Mayo can do it, why can't everyone else? The AARP believes that the potential is there for most communities to have excellent care - we must emulate the care delivery of institutions like the Mayo Clinic, and put in place payment and information systems that will coordinate care management better. It's a big job and will take some investment, but we have many opportunities to do a better job than we're doing today.

"I think it is safe to say that no physician is optimistic about the future of medicine at this point," one participant wrote. Others seemed downright hopeless...the practice of medicine continually gets worse and worse, more intolerable, more onerous, with absolutely no hope or reason for any optimism either in the near or remote future."

Professional medical journals that provide full text articles or entirely open access to non-subscribers.

Patient Centered Learning: The solution is to permit alternatives to rigid institutions, utilize free internet programs, and have medical students assist practicing physicians by assisting practicing physicians in taking patient histories. These students would offer valuable, free services to doctors. At the same time, they would have a vivid learning experience by spending several hours each day interacting with actual patients. The Cost Of Medical Education Would Be Negligible. The expense of healthcare is directly proportional to the cost of the doctor's education. With the institutional bottleneck gone, there would be a greater number of doctors, and the cost of healthcare would plummet.

doctors aren't helping patients through remote means, instead insisting on seeing patients in the office for all medical issues, even the most routine of issues out of habit, out of fear, out of how to get paid.

Take the Challenge - an online programme developed by Age Concern and the RCGP to help improve the diagnosis and treatment of older people with depression.

Read how this young woman has battled against Crohn's disease.

A Curriculum Framework for Undergraduate Medical Education

20 scary old school surgical tools that surgeons used to use on patients. Oww.

"Talk into the right ear, you send your words into a slightly more amenable part of the brain."