- Why medical error and bad outcomes are often hard to differentiate
- Health reform and why it's necessary
- End-of-Life decision-making and its cost
- Why men die younger than women, often unnecessarily
Check out the table of contents to get more specifics about who's in the book and what areas of medicine he or she focuses on.
White Coat Wisdom is all about practicing smart medicine. Has there ever been a time when altruism in medicine was needed more than now? The doctors featured have an enviable record of achievement and give specific examples of how they've found a better way. Let's give you an example. Here's an excerpt from a chapter with Dr. John Whitcomb, an emergency room medical director from Milwaukee, commenting on the wasteful health spending we see in our ERs.
"In America, we're dialyzing ninety-two year-year-old people. We spend the final resources on every life until we've squeezed every possible life out of it. We save life and we tangle ourselves up in all sorts of ethical dilemmas, but there's a lot to talk about what we're doing.
"I find it abominable that we take people who have horrible disabilities, like with a stroke, and their brain is destoryed and they're ninety years old. They can't recognize anybody around them and they put gastric feeding tubes in those foks, so that the GI doctor can get paid for doing that.
"Then, we send them to the ER doctor, so we can work on their fever. We spend thousands of dollars taking care of people who have no meaningful chance of return. And we don't have the resources to give a measles shot to a baby? That's perverse."
Doctor Whitcomb doesn't just list problems in his chapter, he outlines specific solutions. He's practicing smart medicine! Whitcomb's actually saved his ER millions of dollars per year and says every other ER in the country could do the same thing! Why should you care? Because taxpayers, by and large, are the ones who end up footing the bill for waste in our healthcare system, be it through Medicare and Medicaid, and higher insurance premiums.
And that's just one doctor from White Coat Wisdom. There are dozens of others who also make a compelling case on a great variety of other healthcare issues.
White Coat Wisdom's author, Steve Busalacchi, offers KEYNOTE SPEAKING for conferences and other events that provide inspirational and practical answers to many of the challenges facing healthcare today.
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