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Conservatively speaking, there are thousands of people with chronic illnesses who have educated themselves about their conditions via the internet. They quickly managed to become more familiar with their diseases than the physicians who treat them.

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."

While More Americans Need Access to Essential Healthcare, Fewer Primary Care Clinicians Are Available to Treat Them. UVA Professor Says Increased Funding for Title VII Programs May Help Alleviate National Shortage of Primary Care Doctors and Dentists

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"This study suggest that the described inhibitors of empathy may originate in the hidden curriculum and reinforce each other, creating a greater distance between the physician and the patient, and possibly resulting in decreased empathy. Mastering biomedical knowledge is an important part of the students' ideals of the physician's role, and sometimes objective and distanced ideals may suppress empathy and the students' own emotions. "

This tutorial will show you how to optimize your iPad for medical use from the moment you first take it out of the box.

"Central to an effective response is a code of conduct that establishes unequivocally the expectation that everyone is entitled to be treated with courtesy, honesty, respect, and dignity. The code must be enforced fairly through a clear and explicit process and applied consistently regardless of rank or station.Creating a culture of respect requires action on many fronts: modeling respectful conduct; educating students, physicians, and nonphysicians on appropriate behavior; conducting performance evaluations to identify those in need of help; providing counseling and training when needed; and supporting frontline changes that increase the sense of fairness, transparency, collaboration, and individual responsibility."

Doctors with good communication less likely to be sued

A social contract does exist between medicine and society. Because society has chosen to use the concept of the profession as a means of organizing the services of the healer, professionalism has come to serve as the basis of this social contract. What is expected of the physician as healer is largely determined by what it means to be a professional in contemporary society.

"Despite differences in practice patterns of nurses and physicians in using whiteboards, our findings suggest that all providers value their potential as a tool to improve teamwork, communication, and patient care. Successful adoption of whiteboard use may be enhanced through strategies that emphasize a patient-centered focus while also addressing important barriers to use."

As the evidence narrows in on the case that it is the economically disadvantaged that shoulder the bulk of chronic and comorbid illnesses, it is apparent that this burden strains physicians and health care systems as well. Some solutions are at hand.

"Physicians often redirect patients' initial descriptions of their concerns. Once redirected, the descriptions are rarely completed. Consequences of incomplete initial descriptions include late-arising concerns and missed opportunities to gather potentially important patient data. Soliciting the patient's agenda takes little time and can improve interview efficiency and yield increased data."

"They want you to study by yourself and become obsessed with how well you understanding the material. ergo - stop caring about whether anyone else understands it. It would be a great system to develop overconfident get-mine solo practice doctors, but everyone knows there's too much paperwork to run a solo practice these days. We're also coming upon the age of specialists when collaboration will be at a premium. A disease like diabetes is complex. You might need primary care physicians working with vascular surgeons, endocrinologists, ophthalmologists, I could list every specialty. Not to mention nutritionists, personal trainers, policy makers."

"Medical Reel brings together reliable, informative videos for medical students, physicians, surgeons, medical staff and patients. Take a look around and enjoy the Reel."

"To describe the essential components of the medical model of substance use disorders. To delineate the interviewing skills necessary to screen effectively for substance use and abuse. To understand the high rate of psychiatric and medical co-morbidity and more effectively screen patients for these disorders. To demonstrate skills for evaluating patients' stage of change, readiness to accept the diagnosis, and readiness to undertake behavior change. To clearly and supportively recommend treatment to patients with substance use disorders. To describe the skills required for addiction prevention counseling. To define the skills that help set respectful limits on patient requests for prescription medication. To demonstrate awareness of how physician/clinician attitudes toward patients with substance use disorders impact recognition, diagnosis, and treatment of patients. To demonstrate knowledge of substance use disorder treatment standards and the ability to recommend appropriate referrals."

Developed by two physician/gamers, Francis Kong and Arun Mathews, Healing Blade plunges the player into a world of sorcery and creatures, where real-world knowledge of infectious diseases and therapeutics play a pivotal role in the winning strategy.