Skip to main content

Re; An Open Letter to the Surgeon General


Hi - if you found this, I appreciate it. I got encouragement to submit as a letter to the editor, so I need to take this down for now. I hope it gets published. If not, I'll put the letter back up here.
Thanks
Julie


Update - I published these:
https://www.themedicalcareblog.com/asylum-seekers-family-separation-crisis/ is a post on the American Public Health Association's Medical Care Blog on this topic

and https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/06/opinions/open-letter-to-surgeon-general-immigration-graves/index.html
was on CNN's opinion page

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Changing Things for a While to Slow Down Coronavirus and Maybe Keep our Health System Afloat: Post 5

3/21/2020 Today I started to write about our health care system, why it's failing, and what we can do to restructure it. But that's several blog posts and not urgent, and I decided instead to start with what we can do/not do, to prop our health system up for as long as we can. 1. Stay home. Practice social distancing . Don't go shopping. Don't g o into restaurants. Don't go into grocery stores or big-box stores. Have your groceries and restaurant orders delivered or loaded into your car. Don't go to a pharmacy - use the pick-up window or delivery (or mail prescription services - also many pharmacies will sell you over the counter cold and other meds through the pick-up window). Stay home. 2. Don't go to the doctor's office unless directed. If you feel sick, first try to access telemedicine. Call your doctor's office and/or check their website and ask if they do telemedicine visits. Look on your insurance company website and your employ...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to Make Healthcare Actually Patient-Centered

I've been a patient lately. Not just for preventive care, which I've been good about getting when I was working in public health, teaching, or doing telemedicine, but which has been near-impossible to get done when practicing medicine full time. Lately it's been appointments, surgery, follow-up, radiology, specialized tests, more appointments, texts, phone calls, and lots of different and incompatible electronic medical records. It's a mess. I'm as good as an American can be at navigating the health system and advocating for myself, and it's impossible. I cannot get the medical and preventive care I need. Not and keep a job. We must stop looking at the solution as incremental change to the existing structure. None of it works. For my care to be patient-centered, here's what I need: 1. All of my medical records in the cloud, secure and accessible TO ME and, when I give them permission, to doctors, nurses, and hospitals. 2. Medical care will always start w...
Post a Comment
Read more

Changing Things for a While to Slow Down Coronavirus and Maybe Keep our Health System Afloat: Post 2

3/15/2020 (The Ides of March) Sit-Rep (Situation report - FEMA talk): Over the weekend the calls for significant social distancing and closures of public spaces plus restaurants/bars/events have grown. France, Spain, and Italy have closed these public spaces and are keeping people indoors. Schools in most US states are closed, but Americans continue to crowd into airports, lines at big box stores and gun stores are hours long, and many are flaunting public health recommendations. So stopping the spread of this virus for which we have no vaccine and no treatment will likely not be achieved in the US. It's a pandemic, and we are an epicenter. Numbers: The cloud-based operating system DOMO offers this Coronavirus tracker  which shows at least 2200 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the US so far, so at least that many tests have been done. Of these 2200, 47 are casualties (they died from the viral infection). March 10 was first day the confirmed case numbers spiked. About 4000 ...
Post a Comment
Read more