An Inside Look at Health Care for the Elderly and Medicare

With the Presidential elections upon us, I have written a 3-part series about the politics of Medicare. In Part One, we will talk about the salient political reasons that Medicare is failing older Americans, something not being tackled by current reforms, and none of which are being addressed by our candidates. As discussed at length in my book, these failures are tossing unwitting elderly patients in harm’s way, bankrupting the system, and preventing a more sensible approa

An interesting and revealing incident occurred regarding one my patient’s medicines for dementia. I am not an advocate for using medicines for dementia, as I will delineate below, and as I have explained in my book and in previous blogs. Despite how well marketed and utilized these medicines are, despite how deeply patients/families/doctors truly believe that these medicines alone or in combination are necessary weapons to combat the terrible mind-decaying disease, I have n

As a corollary to Erik’s hospital experience as described in our JAMA article from July 2016, we will assess four medical interventions that the medical team felt were vital for Erik while he was hospitalized, none of which were discussed with him, and all of which he ultimately rejected. The complete blog series will be on our IHBR website blog that can br reached by CLICKING HERE and which will discuss all 4 interventions. These include his having bypass surgery for a sin