National Public Radio had a report on the success of HMOs. They suggested that there were other things that were expensive and we might apply HMO techniques to bring down their costs. I didn’t have my recorder in the car and so am describing this 100% from recall. My apologies to the author inasmuch as […]

Although our society was established in 1868, the written record occurred some 81 years later. The official publication of our predecessor society, “The Sacramento Society for Medical Improvement” began in September, 1950 as “The Bulletin.” Dr Charles E Grayson, MD, was the editor. There were reporters for Sutter General, Sutter Maternity, Mercy, and the County […]

The office visit has been the best deal in medicine–but that was when it lasted 15 minutes. Reduction to 10 minutes was a bit tight. Now Chicago University Professor Richard Epstein states he heard a rumor that managed care office visits in California were down to 5 minutes–about 300 seconds. He suggested perhaps that was […]

Organized medicine is our topic of the month as we re-organize our organized medicine structure with new leaders via our own political process. Looking at the cross references between just those three terms yields some interesting insights. We trust they give us pause for reflection… concern… and enlightenment. Organize: to routinize, normalize, standardize, harmonize, or […]

Some HMOs have developed hospital-based physician staffs to manage all inpatients. Although this has been touted as being more efficient, this is generally not the case. A covering doctor, in the absence of the primary doctor, recently admitted a sixty-three-year-old patient to the hospital for exacerbation of bronchitis with respiratory failure. He noted that the […]

The California Medical Association held the first of what is hoped to be a yearly Leadership Conference at the La Quinta resort near Palm Springs. Approximately 400 of Hippocrates’s modern-day kin and invited healthcare “leaders” were present. The keynote speaker was Emily Friedman, writer, lecturer, health policy analyst, and ethicist based in Chicago where she […]

At a recent meeting of the American College of Chest Physicians it was of interest to note the large number of presentations with titles such as: Ethical issues… in medicine… In the ICU… In death and dying…. In withdrawing life support… In health care delivery… Most were rather thin on any ethical discussion and should […]

When I started this column over three years ago, Eugene D Robin, MD, Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Physiology at Stanford gave me some insight concerning the Hippocratic Oath. I had known Dr Robin as one of the foremost investigators after reading some of his hundreds of research articles over the years. As I met […]

“When they call the roll in the Senate, the senators do not know whether to answer ‘Present’ or ‘Not guilty.’” Theodore Roosevelt Many large corporations, which are forbidden by law to donate to political parties, donated rather large sums of moneys to the political conventions. The corporations did not want media exposure which might alienate […]

Doctor Paul Striker, a New York plastic surgeon, estimates that one in five members of Congress has undergone some form of plastic surgery. We always knew that politicians try to make themselves look better than they really are, but did we ever suspect that they would go to this extent? Herb Caen recently reported that […]