Hospitals need internists with a broader view (and functions)

@varelalaf

Internal medicine is a speciality of long tradition and the mother of almost all non-surgical specialities, so what is expected of it is to provide a general vision in the hospital care of complex patients. The internists are formed under the principle that no adult clinical issue is foreign to them, although they cannot cover in-depth all the knowledge and techniques that are available to modern medicine, so they should lead, more than they do now, multidisciplinary teams, to offer complex patients comprehensive care, instead of having to suffer the sum of multiple often uncoordinated actions.

Primary care: the law of reverse healthcare 49 years later

@varelalaf

The current primary care operation system guarantees citizens that they will be able to see their family doctor, or whoever replaces them, whenever they deem it convenient and, in this way, doctors, in their day to day, are faced with an agenda full of unfiltered visits, a source of widespread dissatisfaction, both for the neediest patients who feel under-served, as well as for doctors, who waste too much time in resolving matters that are not their own, not forgetting that, in this scenario, nurses are relegated to a secondary role.

Most of all, don’t leave the room, so you don’t miss the doctor

Anna Sant

"A much closed organization, where information doesn't flow. While you are in the hospital, you live in an environment where nobody wants to have the responsibility of communicating with you. They place this responsibility on the patient: if you have any problem, ring the bell and someone will turn up. Meanwhile, just stay here. And, above all, don't move, so you don’t miss the doctor. "

This is the story that a relative told me two weeks ago when he explained his recent hospital stay after thirty years without stepping foot in any. He added: "You realize that you are in their hands (surely good hands, I have nothing to complain about), but nothing is expected of you as a patient." And he explicitly repeated: "One more thing: don't get out of the room, so you don’t miss the doctor..."

Medicine must be value-based

Paco Miralles

Many of us believe that medicine in general and doctors, in particular, should direct efforts to provide patients with value services. This approach would leave even the profane flabbergasted: but do doctors not do for their patients that which gives them value?

It's important to know the past to understand the present and outline the future. For a few decades, we have acted based on evidence-based medicine, a movement that led to the transition to a methodologically neater practice. Assistance based on tradition and empirical experience would succumb in the face of well-structured studies. This revolutionary concept led him to be nominated as one of the ideas of the year 2001 by The New York Times.

The rise of artificial intelligence will bring changes...

Gustavo Tolchinsky

During 2017, the exhibition "David Bowie is" passed through Barcelona, which reviewed the life and all the creative facets of one of the musical geniuses of the 20th century and personally, author of some of my most beloved songs, such as Changes. One of the curiosities that visitors could discover in it was the Verbasizer, a computer program that offered random combinations of words to generate new opportunities to create phrases, as a creativity assistant. Bowie was avant-garde in many ways and he demonstrated this by risking not only with groundbreaking designs but with the incorporation of technological tools.