Monthly Archives: July 2012

Profit-driven medicine: Satisfying patients at the expense of their health

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Why would patients who report greater satisfaction with their health care be worse off medically? This JAMA article, Patient Satisfaction & Patient-Centered Care: Necessary but Not Equal, offers an explanation that makes sense. It points to the commercialization of health care – treating the patient as a consumer – as the villain. (All quotations in what follows are from this article.)

The patient (consumer) satisfaction survey

In the US, many doctors are evaluated and rewarded based on patient satisfaction surveys. Motivated to produce high patient satisfaction scores, doctors are inclined to order more diagnostic tests. Why? It’s more than a simple desire to please the patient.

When physicians’ performance evaluations and incomes are tied to patient satisfaction, the situation becomes ripe for overuse and misuse of diagnostic and therapeutic procedures because it allows the physician to rationalize decision making in terms of patient satisfaction.

Pleasing a patient is a conscious, individualized choice. Rationalized decision making can easily become an automatic habit that requires no additional thought. Read more

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On healthism, the social determinants of health, conformity, & embracing the abnormal: (4) The abnormal part

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Abnormal psychologyContinued from parts one, two, and three.

A year ago, when I decided to call my declining rate of blogging a ‘sabbatical,’ I wrote down some questions to explore while I took time off to read.

How did we find our way into the dissatisfactions of the present – the commercialization of medicine, the corporatization of health care, the commodification of health? Does understanding the path we followed offer any insight into finding a better direction? Was the increasingly impersonal nature of the doctor-patient relationship inevitable once medicine became a science? Or was it only inevitable once health care emphasized profits over patients and the common good?

At the time I thought I would read primarily in the history of medicine, and that was how I started. Appreciating the historical context of medicine is important for understanding both how medicine ended up where it is today and what medicine could become. “The texture and context of the medical past provide perspective, allowing us to formulate questions about what we can realistically and ideally expect from medicine in our own time,” I wrote.

Now that I’ve become more familiar with the social determinants of health, I’m less optimistic about the future. The problem is not simply that the corporatization of health care has increased dissatisfaction among both doctors and patients. The problem is that our focus is so narrowly limited to health care systems that we fail to see the larger issue. As one metaphor puts it, doctors are so busy pulling diseased patients out of the river, there’s no time to look upstream and ask who’s throwing the bodies into the water. Read more

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On healthism, the social determinants of health, conformity, & embracing the abnormal: (3) Connections

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Continued from parts one and two, where I defined the terms used in the following diagram of my blogging interests. Click on the graphic for a larger image.

Blog topics and their connections

If I had written the previous two posts a year ago, I would have realized how much my interests were intertwined. I guess I wasn’t ready to do that. Anyway, in this post I catalog some of the connections.

Healthism

~ Healthism and psychological and physical conformity: Healthy lifestyle campaigns promote an ideal way of life that encourages individuals to alter their behavior and appearance. Although it’s true that we would all be better off if we didn’t smoke, that doesn’t make anti-smoking laws any less authoritarian, i.e., requiring conformity (see the section on anti-authority healthism in this post). The fitness aspect of healthy lifestyles promotes the desirability for both men and women of acquiring (i.e., conforming to) specific body images.

“Self-help is the psychiatric equivalent of healthism.” That’s a slogan I made up. I’m not sure yet if it will stand up to scrutiny. Certainly the self-help industry encourages self-criticism, which leads to a preoccupation with those aspects of personality currently considered undesirable. Read more

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On healthism, the social determinants of health, conformity, & embracing the abnormal: (2) Economics & the socio-political

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Continued from part one, where I discussed the first three of my six interests: healthism, medicalization, and psychological and physical conformity. Click on the graphic below to see a larger image.

Blog topics and their connections

The social determinants of health

Social determinants of health (often abbreviated SDOH) refers to unequally distributed social and economic conditions that correlate with unequal and inequitable distributions of health and disease. Presumably there is a causal relationship between the two, not merely a correlation. Definitively identifying the causal mechanisms, however, is difficult. A great many things influence our health (including things we’re not even aware of yet), and it can be difficult to isolate and scientifically study some of the ones we strongly suspect, like poverty, isolation, or a sense of being socially inferior.

The medical model is the preferred framework in modern westernized societies for explaining the distribution of health and disease. It emphasizes risk behavior (smoking, diet), clinical risk factors (blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol levels), genetics, health care access and quality, behavioral change, and patient education. One common characteristic of the medical model’s explanation of health and disease is that causes are located in the individual (behavior, genes), not in the individual’s economic and social environment. Read more

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On healthism, the social determinants of health, conformity, & embracing the abnormal: (1) Bodies, minds & medicine

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It’s always hard to be sure about these things, but I think the reason I decided to take a ‘sabbatical’ from blogging last July was that I was interested in too many seemingly unrelated topics. Writing about all of them left me feeling like I never got to the ‘meat’ of any one of them. And I couldn’t convince myself to focus on just one or two things, since that would mean abandoning the others, which I was unwilling to do.

Now that I’ve taken the past year to read and reflect, I find – duh! – that my interests are not as unrelated as I’d assumed. In hindsight, I should have realized this long ago, but, alas, I did not. I’m writing this post to clarify to myself what I now see as the common threads that connect my interests.

Here is a diagram that groups my interests into six categories. (Click on the graphic to see a larger image.)

Blog topics and their connections

Four of the six categories relate to all five of the others. The two outliers (neoliberalism and medicalization) are not as directly related as I feel the others are. Read more

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Guest post: The unemployed as the waste products of the success factory

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Waste products of the success factoryPierre Fraser is an author, essayist, and PhD candidate in sociology at Université Laval. We share an abiding interest in healthism or, as Pierre would say, santéisme. For the original version of this post, see L’individu devenu déchet. Pierre blogs at Pierre Fraser and tweets as @pierre_fraser.

Unlike some countries these days, America seems to have little difficulty tolerating the idea of multiculturalism. An explanation for this, perhaps, can be found in the American ideology of success. This ideology acts like a suction pump, removing any alternative explanations of how the world should work. This myth is contagious. The American dream – you can be whatever you want to be – circles the globe like a very powerful trademark.

In the myth of the self-made man, everything is possible. So powerful is this belief that nothing seems able to deter it. Contact with this idea creates the equivalent of an addiction. Every addiction, however, has its downside. We forget that every day “two types of trucks leave the factory: one type goes to the warehouse and department store, the other to the landfill. We have grown up with a story that considers only the first truck and ignores the second. ” [1] Read more

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SCOTUS, the Affordable Care Act, and an ugly American tradition

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Romney: Repeal & Replace ObamacareI thought I had exhausted my need to read or listen to anything more on the Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act (ACA). I read something today, however, that made me realize I hadn’t been paying close enough attention. It was an article published by The New England Journal of Medicine called The Road Ahead for the Affordable Care Act

The author, John McDonough, points out the significance of the upcoming November elections. In particular, he clarified for me why recent mentions of ‘reconciliation’ are not just referring to how the ACA was passed in 2010.

In January 2013, if Democrats hold the White House and Senate and regain control of the House, the ACA will be implemented mostly as constructed. If Republicans capture the White House and Senate and retain House control, the ACA will face major deconstruction early in 2013. Republican leaders will attempt to use Congress‘s budget-reconciliation authority to enact extensive repeal — and will need only 51 Senate votes, with no filibuster threat. If control of the White House and Congress is divided between the parties, then conflict over the law will persist. Thus, the November elections increasingly feel like a referendum on the ACA.

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