Doctors

Do Physicians Have a Responsibility to Meet the Health Care Needs of Society?

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An interesting article appears in the Fall 2012 issue of the The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics by Allan S. Brett titled “Physicians Have a Responsibility to Meet the Health Care Needs of Society.” Allan opens the article by addressing a question that was posed to Ron Paul in the 2012 presidential election by Wolf Blizter which I mentioned before on this post https://blog.teethremoval.com/dumb-americans-trust-their-doctors-for-no-valid-reason/. Allan aruged that Ron Paul agreed with the sentiment that “physicians have a responsibility to meet the health care needs of society.” In the article Allan makes the following case. “In the rest of this essay, I first demonstrate that society is already organized— at least in part — to rescue sick people regardless of ability to pay, and that society is not prepared to abandon that general guiding principle. It follows that physicians — … Read more

Now is a Great Time to Sell Your Dental Practice: Four Signs of the Industry Season

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Right now, over the next 12 to 18 months, may be the perfect time to sell your dental practice. Even if you are not in the market to retire, you can sell your practice. Many dentists sell their practices so they no longer have worry about owning a business and providing for several staff and their families. Selling a practice can give dentists an opportunity to work as professors or to simply just practice their crafts. Selling a practice often leaves dentists in a comfortable financial situation. With approaching challenges, like Obama-care, many dentists are selling because recent dental school graduates are able to get good lending rates to buy well-established practices. At one dental society meeting, a speaker informed the crowd on the approaching economics and Obama-care programs.  This speaker explained that veteran dentists will not benefit from the … Read more

Controversy Over Spinal Fusion

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Debate over spinal fusion surgery continues to occur. A recent article tiled “Spinal fusions serve as a case study for debate over when certain surgeries are necessary,” appears in the Washington Post written by Peter Whoriskey and Dan Keating and published on October 27, 2013. (Note I have previously mentioned some of the controversy over spinal fusion in the post Tips to Prevent Medical Errors – AHRQ) The article mentions that spinal fusions being performed in the U.S. has risen over the years and that around half of the surgeries they reviewed don’t meet expert consensus on when the surgery should be performed. This article discusses a surgeon at a Florida hospital who was earning well over a million a year performing spinal fusions on patients. Auditors at the hospital began to wonder if all the cases were necessary and … Read more

Lessons from Medical Litigation of Dentists

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Back in June of 2013, I discussed in the post Lessons from Medical litigation in oral surgery practice several lessons that can be learned upon exploring lawsuits occurring in an oral surgery setting. An interesting post on the same topic but applied to dentists as a whole was just written earlier today in DrBicuspid, titled “When a dentist becomes the defendant,” by Meghan Guthman (October 7, 2013, source: http://www.drbicuspid.com/index.aspx?sec=sup&sub=pmt&pag=dis&ItemID=314397&wf=1660“) Apparently this article was already written in the American Student Dental Association in their summer 2013 issue and was just a reprint. The article discusses some data gathered by Medical Protective which is a malpractice insurance company. Their data shows that the average payment to a plaintiff in a dental malpractice lawsuit is $65,000. Around 20% of their dental malpractice cases between 2003 and 2012 involved a tooth extraction with the average … Read more

Upcoming Changes to JOMS and AAOMS in 2014

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I wanted to update readers on some of the upcoming changes which will be taking place in the world of oral and maxillofacial surgery in 2014. The first change has to deal with JOMS (Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery). These updates are addressed in the editorial in the September 2013, JOMS, by  James Hupp titled, “The Journal’s Performance and Upcoming New Features” (J Oral Maxillofac Surg., vol. 71, pp. 1481-1483, 2013). In brief, JOMS has managed to decrease the time it takes to get accepted in the journal from 12 to 18 months to just 3 to 6 months. This improves the time for new updates to permeate throughout the field. Furthermore, when articles are accepted they are available rapidly for viewing online (although editing still has to occur). Several interesting developments are occurring: A) Soon, AAOMS Press Releases … Read more