Dumb, Dumber and Deather

I don't know who is dumb or dumber the Republican/conservative machine(the deathers) or those in the public who believe them. There are few other issues more important for a patient to discuss with their physician then their living will and what their wishes are if and when they get close to death as we all will one day. Now when a physician who usually spends only 12-15 minutes per patient discusses these issues, which require much more time, they have to lie and claim that they are treating the patient for one of their conditions.

The more rational thing is to allow doctors to have open and frank discussions on these issues with their patients. Then allow the doctor to honestly bill for these services. To think that a legislation is going to get doctors to violate our Hippocratic Oath, how ridiculous. Patients need to understand what their choices are in a living will and their doctor needs to understand their end of life wishes. The proposed legislation simply allows physicians to have the appropriate time for this and to get fairly reimbursed for it. So don't be a dead head, a dumber or a dummy and work to get good health reform that covers everyone, has no pre-existing provisions and prevents Insurance Companies from denying care to those they insure.

Science based Medicin e conferance at TAM-7

Great Lectures today on Science based medicine. Case studies in Cancer Quackery, Scientific Critique of Chiropractic, Lyme Disease. I will be blogging on each of these after I inteview the presentors friday and saturday. I will give one highlight from each talk.
1) while we need to individualize each patients treatment we often ( and I can see myself doing it) we let errors like false pattern recognition, influenced by quirky personal experience , over reliance on non-specific signs and symptonsand conformational bias.
2)Suzzanne Summers only had Stage one Cancer and had 94-96% chance of 10 year survival with or without additional treatment and chemo would only have added 1-4 % improvement in survival so her claims of alternative medicine cured her is blatantly wrong.
3) 20% of all Basilar strokes are caused by chiropractic manipulation, 1/2 of all chiropractic manipulation has negative side effects, Children should never be manipulated by chiropractor.
4) Chronic Lyme disease: most likely no such thing as chronic Lyme disease ;
definitely no such thing as chronic Lyme disease that responds to antibiotic
Check back over next couple days for full story.

the Science-Based Medicine Conference to start July 9th morning

I will be attending the Science-Based Medicine Conference chaired by Dr Novella. I will be blogging about it during conference and reporting on it on my radio show The Doctor Is In on macsworldlive.com every Monday at 2 PM central