A Speech For The Ages – 83 Years Ago This Christmas
By MIKE MAGEE
On the evening of December 29, 1940, with election to his 3rd term as President secured, FDR delivered these words as part of his sixteenth “Fireside Chat”: “There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness…No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it.”
Millions of Americans, and millions of Britains were tuned in that evening, as President Roosevelt made clear where he stood while carefully avoiding over-stepping his authority in a nation still in the grips of a combative and isolationist opposition party.
That very evening, the Germans Luftwaffe, launched their largest yet raid ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - December 22, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Non-Health Churchill Democracy FDR Hitler Mike Magee Trump Source Type: blogs
Econoclasm: Lesson Three
Continuing with our explication of why the " discipline " of economics as commonly taught is complete bullshit, a component of the theory is called “declining marginal utility.” This means that the first two or three tomatoes you buy are worth more to you than the next three, and by the time you have more than you can possibly eat before the next one goes bad, they’re basically worthless. (We’ll leave aside that the seller, whether a co rporation or your neighborhood farmer, would like to sell as many tomatoes as possible and does not experience declining marginal utility of money.) This idea seems basically ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 21, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
The Future of Healthcare: Integrated Data for Integrated Care
The following is a guest article by Venki Subramanian, SVP Product Management at Reltio
When data is missing, inaccurate, incomplete, or misdirected, it can have severe, sometimes life-altering impacts.
For example, in a survey by the Journal of the American Medical Association, approximately 1 in 5 patients who reviewed their electronic health record (EHR) ambulatory notes found an error–and 40% of these patients perceived the mistakes as serious, including mistakes in diagnoses, medical history, medications, test results, notes on the wrong patient, and sidedness.
Healthcare organizations are grappling with the challen...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - December 20, 2023 Category: Information Technology Authors: Guest Author Tags: Analytics/Big Data EMR-EHR Healthcare IT Data Management Healthcare Data Integrated Data Patient Care Regulations Reltio Security Threats Venki Subramanian Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: The Forgiveness Scam
Psalm 32 introduces an idea we haven ' t really seen explicitly in the Hebrew Bible until now -- or if we have I missed it. That is the idea that we are all sinners but if we confess our sins to God we can be forgiven. ( " Maskil " means something like " wise, " in other words this is intended to be instructive.) The psalm is important in both Jewish and Christian liturgy. In some Jewish traditions it is recited on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and verse 8 is recited as part of the Foundation of Repentance on Rosh Hashanah. Paul refers to verses 1 and 2 in Romans 4, in asserting a central doctrine of Christian theology...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 20, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Econoclasm: Lesson Two
Let us return briefly to the lonesome world of Alice and Bob. For the transaction to truly benefit both of them, it should be obvious that they both have to know exactly what they are getting – that’s called the assumption of perfect information. If X turns to be less than Bob expected, or possibly no good whatever, Bob is not happier after all. Asymmetric information is common throughout the economy – generally, sellers know more about the product than buyers – but it’s obviou sly an inherent feature of Medicine. After all, the product for sale is expertise. Another assumption is that Alice and Bob both ent...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 19, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
NextGen Focusing on AI to Improve Workflows and on Street Medicine
NextGen Healthcare is taking a methodical approach to AI and deploying it in places based on customer demand and where it will have maximum positive impact. Right now, that means using ambient clinical voice to generate SOAP notes. The company is also delivering more mobile capability to enable street medicine.
In an exclusive interview with Healthcare IT, David Sides, Chief Executive Officer and Dr. Robert (Bob) Murry, Chief Medical Officer at NextGen Healthcare (NextGen) sat down to explain their AI strategy, their view on AI in healthcare, and their plans to support customers with street medicine programs. We caught up ...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - December 18, 2023 Category: Information Technology Authors: Colin Hung Tags: Ambulatory C-Suite Leadership Clinical EMR-EHR Health IT Company Healthcare IT Ambient Assist Ambient Clinical Voice American Health Network Brian Heimer David Sides Dr. Bob Murry Dr. Ebony M. Funches Dr. Robert Murry FQHC He Source Type: blogs
Econoclasm 101
I ' m going to do a series in which I explain why most of what you read in the paper, see on teevee, or hear politicians say about economics -- how the economy works, and why we should minimize taxes and government intervention -- is utter gibberish. Here is the first lesson.Introductory economics textbook writers are fond of proposing what they call “simplifying assumptions.” They invent cartoon worlds in which there are only two people with goods to exchange, or only two products for sale. They imagine how these worlds would work and then argue that these imaginings can be extrapolated to explain how the real world w...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 18, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: It's complicated
Psalm 31, first of all, cannot possibly have been written by David, because it is derivative of works known to have been written in the 5th Century BC. (Although some no doubt have earlier sources, the compilation was made in the 5th Century.) It is well known. Verse 5 is the source of the purported last words of Jesus. It is quite self-contradictory however. The speaker is in a miserable state, apparently physically repulsive, and either paranoid or in fact subject to persecution. Yet he is full of praise for God ' s goodness, begging for succor and apparently expecting to get it. This is the fundamental contradiction of ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 17, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Maybe giving too much credit
Health reporter Julie Rovner is perplexed thatRepublicans, who she maintains were once big supporters of public health, now seem to want to kill us all. Her examples of former Republican championship for public health are pretty narrow and a bit dubious. Funding for the NIH is mostly about biomedical research, not public health; and GW Bush ' s President ' s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, while certainly a good thing, was focused on Africa and probably as much about international relations as humanitarianism. But it ' s certainly true that the party has turned its back on these programs: The GOP-led House this y...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 15, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
AI Could Have “Unimaginable Consequences” For Democratic Societies, Says Expert.
By MIKE MAGEE
His biography states, “He speaks to philosophical questions about the fears and possibilities of new technology and how we can be empowered to shape our future. His work to bridge cultures spans artificial intelligence, cognition, language, music, creativity, ethics, society, and policy.”
He embraces the title “cross-disciplinary,” and yet his PhD thesis at UC Berkeley in 1980 “was one of the first to spur the paradigm shift toward machine learning based natural language processing technologies.” Credited with inventing and building “the world’s first global-scale online language transla...
Source: The Health Care Blog - December 14, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech AI Dr. De Kai Mike Magee Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Petitioning the Lord with Prayer
To me, one of the strangest conceits of religion -- and it seems to be pretty much universal among theists -- is that it ' s worth your while to beg The Almighty to conform to your wishes. He is supposedly all knowing, all powerful, and infinitely wise, but evidently he needs your advice in order to do what ' s right. Obviously, he doesn ' t always take it, but that doesn ' t stop people from continuing to give it, as in Psalm 28. Psalm 29 is a panegyric to God ' s power and greatness, quite reminiscent of parts of the Book of Job. However, if you read this literally it seems to refer to a natural disaster of so...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 13, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
The arrogance of expertise
Here is a thoughtful essay by NYT reporter Ed Yong. (Free Gift link! [as opposed to a not free gift]) It ' s long, but worth it. Yong was assigned the Long Covid beat and he found -- as I already knew -- that people who tell their doctors about long-term fatigue, pain, and cognitive difficulties, for which the physicians could find no specific biophysical explanation, commonly found their complaints dismissed or even ridiculed:Covering long Covid
solidified my view that science is not the objective, neutral force it
is often misconstrued as. It is instead a human endeavor, relentlessly
buffeted by our culture, values an...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 11, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Tell it to Job
In Psalm 26, the singer boasts of being perfectly righteous and faithful to the Lord; he (presumably) expects to be rewarded. In Psalm 27, the singer is absolutely confident of God ' s protection. We know, of course, that the real world doesn ' t work that way. Very often, the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer. Being pious isn ' t any protection at all. This is what we call magical thinking. Praying, purporting to believe, performing the rituals, and obeying the commandments just aren ' t going to protect you from the dangers of the world. But many people would like to think so.A Psalm of David.26 Vindicate me, ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 10, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Proselytizing
I bought an electric car -- a Chevy Bolt to be specific. I bought it used, but it only has 16,000 miles on it so it ' s about as good as new. And guess what else? It was cheap. The sticker price was $16,500 and with the dealer conveyance fee, registration and taxes I handed over a check for $19,000 and drove away. I ' m spending about another $800 to install a fast charger, and that will be that. I will never pay for an oil change, or an emissions test, or a muffler, belts, coolant, any of the maintenance expenses you expect for an automobile. There ' s no catalytic converter to steal. I don ' t have to stop and pump gas, ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 9, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
A doctor struggles to provide mental health care in Appalachia
As a West Virginia primary care doctor, I frequently—read: daily—find myself in uncomfortable situations. A few recent events, however, are out of the ordinary, even by the standards to which I am accustomed. Though unique to Martinsburg, WV, I expect similar themes in myriad offices across American health care. If your job resembles mine, I
Read more…
A doctor struggles to provide mental health care in Appalachia originally appeared in KevinMD.com. (Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog)
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - December 8, 2023 Category: General Medicine Authors: Ryan McCarthy, MD Tags: Physician Primary Care Source Type: blogs
