I was privileged this week to speak at the annual meeting of the American Pain Society. It was especially gratifying to address a group of clinicians and researchers committed to one of the most laudable causes in all of health care: the relief of pain, and the alleviation of human suffering. Maybe they lose by a nose to those saving the rain forests, but it’s a close call.
Medical care, whether it is sick care or prevention and wellness care, is in desperate need of new business models. Most physician entrepreneurs have a hard time describing a business model, let alone creating new ones. They are not alone.
By definition, a muddle is an untidy or disorganized collection. The verb denotes propagating confusion by bringing some topic into just such a state. I regret to say that, accordingly, the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) is poised to muddle the management of symptoms, and chronic disease risk at menopause.
Sometimes it is a light breeze across my face, sometimes it is a flutter in my heart, sometimes it is a glimmer of a memory, and momentarily, you are with me dad. The sensation never lasts long, just a flash sometimes as I’m talking to a patient or writing notes in a chart, and as soon as I recognize it, you are gone. But in that moment, it is like you are tapping me on the shoulder and saying “stop, take a breath, remember.” And so I remember moments, like a still picture in a slideshow.
There is a particular irony in marking the occasion of Memorial Day by misremembering history. TIME Magazine’s cover story about why diets fail so many of us, and why so many of us are fat, is thus almost as ironic as it is interesting. The article apparently misremembers, and all but fails to mention, the most fundamental, influential, and flagrant of explanations for our obesity problem. But we’ll come back to that.
I was sitting in a chair next to my son wondering if he was going to die. He was sound asleep, so I flipped through my emails on my Apple laptop that was now covered with stickers I had taken from the pediatric cancer nurses station. Superman, Despicable Me, SpongeBob, Cancer Sucks, NY Yankees ... all the edges on the stickers were starting to wear a bit.
So now that biomedical and clinical innovation and entrepreneurship are on the lips of seemingly anyone who has anything to do with sick care, we are seeing lots of seminars, conferences and workshops on the subjects. The latest twist is to get clinicians, entrepreneurs, investors and techies in the same room in an effort to get them to play nice together.