Sunday, May 20, 2007

Panda Bear challenges the conventional wisdom

Panda Bear is a medical blog I discovered today, thanks to Kevin. Panda Bear seeks to challenge the politically correct dogma of an elitist medical establishment he refers to as “The Man”. His contrarian ways of looking at medicine and society are refreshing. Here’s a sampling from recent posts:

The conventional wisdom is that the American health care system is broken. This is the party line parroted by the various media organs of the dependocracy in their attempt to stampede an excitable public towards socialized medicine. Like a lot of the conventional wisdom, the idea of a broken health care system gets repeated so often that it has become a cliche, something that people spout in a self-righteous reflex. It is certainly a pleasant metaphor and an easy one for the people to get a handle on without having to think about the real complexities of delivering zero-defect medical care to a largely non-compliant public….


We pay lip service to the idea of patient-centered health care of course, and including the patient as an equal partner in medical decisions is the New Religion. In our society however, where a physician can get sued for not having written on the discharge instructions for a dead crack dealer, “Return to Emergency Department if chest pain returns,” well, there just isn’t as much equal partnering as you’d like to believe.

In fact, there’s none to speak of where it counts. Not an artery hardens or liver fails without a physician somewhere, somehow being blamed.

There are many versions of the Hippocratic Oath and it is continuously edited to suit the demands of political correctness.

…..it is not a requirement that physicians be social activists or professional busy-bodies.

Maybe a hundred years ago you could make a case for magic potions and mysterious cures from the East but today we should know better and only don’t because of a combination of scientific illiteracy and an ingrained bias against rational Western thought.

I’m adding Panda Bear to my blogroll. Stat.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I agree...Panda is grounding. As is your blog, also.