Am I part of the problem?

Courtesy Scott Burgan Flickr

What is scarier than finding out that your hard work might be part of the problem?


Healthcare is a $2 trillion dollar problem that's getting worse- funding for education, infrastructure, public safety, and even public health is flat. At the same time we have headlines about race riots, train derailments, and even oils spills. It's hard to believe it's 2015 and our police are still brutalizing minorities, our trains are falling off their tracks (presumably because someone hit it with a rock), and we can't seem to keep toxic sludge inside of its pipes.




And, as we've known for a long time, health outcomes in this country continue to lag the developed world despite the cost the astronomical price tag.

As we dump money into health at the expense of the rest of life, it feels weird to work hard in the hospital. All around me, the gleaming healthcare buildings rise as I admit and discharge more and more patients from the hospital. I can't help but feel that, with each CAT scan and lab test that issues forth from the keystrokes under my fingertips, I'm adding to this medical industrial colossus at the expense of better police training, better teacher salaries and better roads for their students' buses, better trains, more equitable housing, better schools with better lunches...

Half the time, I'm not terribly sure that another complete blood count will help the patient I'm ordering it for. But I do know that better education is a slam dunk.

What if the balance of my toils is more harmful than good? What if society has chosen me to labor in the interests of the sick and the vulnerable, but I'm really toiling for the profit of the already profitable, with less to spare for public interventions that we know to be effective? What if I'm doing more harm than good?


It's been said that we don't talk about the things that are most in need of talking about. My hope with this blog is to help start the conversation about the drivers of a broken healthcare system that go largely unmentioned at least in the halls of academic medical centers.