From 4-6 December 2014, I had the good fortune to attend the 5th Annual Comprehensive Advanced Restorative Effort (C.A.R.E.) Summit at the Naval Medical Center, San Diego (NMCSD). I travelled […]
US healthcare
William Cayley: Meeting our patients in the midst of their chaos
“Not again . . . ” The mom with the troubled teen is late for their appointment . . . “Not again . . . ” The elderly widow needs […]
William Cayley: Thanks for what?
This has been quite a year . . . but then again, what year is not? Each passing year seems to bring a fresh crop of challenges, crises, obstacles, and […]
Ted Alcorn: What we don’t know can kill us—confronting gun violence with data
In the United States, the intractable politics of gun violence prevention—and of gun violence itself—rest on a seeming contradiction: we give gun violence far more attention than other causes of […]
William Cayley: Social history on the back roads
Social context and relationships may shape what drives our patients, but sometimes the best way to ponder these is on a drive! En route to a home visit today, I […]
William Cayley: Overdiagnosis, uncertainty, and epistemology
Many thanks to Anita Jain for reporting on the “Overdiagnosis” session at the Cochrane Colloquium—I wish I could have been there. The suspicion that overdiagnosis (or at least over testing) […]
William Cayley: Social history consultations and patient time vs patient time
Who are you, what do you need, and how do I figure out how to care for you? Fundamentally, those are the questions that drive every encounter between a doctor […]
William Cayley: Thinking about Ebola from the sidelines
Recently I was staring at two dramatically different bits of “news” on my computer screen. Yet another story on the spreading Ebola outbreak was in one window, and the latest update […]
William Cayley: Facing uncertainty
The first case of Ebola in the United States, a cluster of cases of “acute neurologic illness with focal limb weakness of unknown etiology in children,” and ongoing concern over […]
The BMJ Today: A new era in transparency
A new era in openness and transparency—and arguments over data—has begun with the publication of the first tranche of data made available under the US’s Sunshine Act. The act makes all […]