Petty Rounds
Tuesday, November 4 2008
Grand Rounds is up at Nurse Ratched’s Place, but sans any contribution from this blogger. It turns out my email got caught in a spam filter (not sure why), so I was only overlooked, not deliberately ignored. Mother Jones has promised to make it better, but I can’t help it if my tender feelings are a little hurt. To nurse my petulance, I now present Petty Rounds – a review of very recent news and posts – because I really am no bigger than this.
1) Maggie Mahar follows up with her long-awaited sequel to “The Truth About Spiraling Health Care Costs, Part I”. Speaking of petulance, Health Beat doesn’t seem to acknowledge my trackbacks. What gives?
2) Stealing from Grand Rounds, DrRich at Covert Rationing makes a good point about Americans’ right to care: we’re already paying for it. His argument is consistent with his previous posts, so I don’t think it refutes anything I said here, but it’s worth a read nonetheless.
3) Dr. Mintz has a list of tips for patients looking for a diagnosis. Usually these sorts of tips are things like “Don’t speak unless spoken to”, “Don’t make eye contact with your physician”, etc. Dr. Mintz’s list is actually pretty good, and suggests some reciprocity in the physician-patient relationship.
4) Disruptive Women in Health Care has a post about Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease (as does Chronic Dose) urging people to “Vote like your health depends on it”. All well and good, except the PFCD can’t actually tell you who to vote for; all they can do is reproduce pablum from the two party’s platforms. Yes, both parties are talking about chronic illness, but saying very different things. As far as chronic illness is concerned, Obama’s plan for health care reform (while not ideal) is far far better than McCain’s. As for the PFCD, I am deeply skeptical of the organization’s ability to focus on concrete reform; there are simply too many people at the table, and not enough of them representing actual patients. (I am, however, prepared to be proven wrong on this.)
That’s all I’ve got. I look forward to next week’s Grand Rounds, to be hosted at Musings of a Distractible Mind, in hope that my wounded pride will be further mended by mention then.
Dear Duncan Cross (Sounds like a pub in Britain),
Blogs are just for fun! Really!
Smiling,
Tammy
I know – and sometimes it’s fun to bitch and moan more than is really called for. I’m not really angry at Nurse Ratched. Spam filters, on the other hand….
Duncan–
I’m sorry I didn’t acknowledge your “trackbacks”– I didn’t see it.
Where would it show up?
Maggie Mahar
Maggie – shoot, now I feel like even more of a jerk than I want to be. There’s a box on your blog for “Trackbacks” that seems never to have any other blogs listed. You probably have to approve trackback links – there’s a lot of spam blogs out there – but I don’t know what that process should look like for you. When I get trackbacks, they show up as comments – they get emailed to me – but that’s WordPress, and it looks like you’re using Typepad (?).
This might not be exclusive to me: I noticed Kevin MD linked to a post of yours, and you didn’t get a trackback from that, either. I suspect Kevin is pro enough that he tried to send you the trackback, but somehow it didn’t get through.
By the way, I appreciate you following up on this. Thanks much.