You go to the doctor and you’re sent for blood tests. Almost always, we’re told, “we’ll call if we see something wrong.” So, we wait and if we don’t hear from the doctor’s office, we figure that everything is ok. Or is it?
According to this press release, Physicians frequently fail to inform patients about abnormal test results , not hearing about your results doesn’t mean there’s nothing wrong – it could be that the results were lost, not seen, or physicians believe their patients were informed by someone else.
Moral of the story? Follow up. If you’ve had any kind …read more

We talked about anonymous doctor blogs in March, and they’ve caught the eye of the New York Times, too. But this exploration is a bit more sensitive and a bit less sinister: true confessions of doctors’ innermost thoughts.
As long as doctors aren’t spilling patient secrets, I see no problem with this kind of blogging. Do you?
Contents © Copyright 2007 Kristen King

On the heels of Wednesday’s article on the closer examination of doctors’ relationships with pharmaceutical companies, an editorial in today’s New York Times calls for some house cleaning on a much higher level, in the FDA.
Earlier this week, Gardiner Harris and Janet Roberts reported in “Doctors’ Ties to Drug Makers Are Put on Close View,”
In dozens of interviews, most doctors said that these payments [from pharmaceutical companies] had no effect on their care of patients.
…
There is nothing illegal about doctors’ accepting money for marketing talks, and professional organizations have largely ignored the issue.
But research shows that doctors who have close …read more