Eric Beam is an internal medicine physician who blogs at The Long White Coat.

Antibiotic resistance is the climate change of medicine

Meds
February 6, 2020

Imagine a looming global crisis that threatens the health of countless people, confounding scientists and governments with its sheer magnitude and complexity and growing at a pace that will quickly exceed our ability to reverse course.

Sounds a little like climate change, right?

The existential threat I’m referring to in this case is microscopic: antibiotic-resistant bacteria and fungi.

In a way, antibiotic resistance is the climate change of medicine. It has potentially lethal …

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Antibiotic resistance is the climate change of medicine

Welcome to the world of post-truth medicine

Physician
January 22, 2017

During this recent emotional and divisive election cycle, much ink was devoted to analyzing the brave new political world we now live in, a world in which just about anyone with an audience and a platform can issue statements that are accepted as fact by millions of people, often in the face of solid evidence to the contrary.

I’m talking, of course, about the world of Read more…

Welcome to the world of post-truth medicine

Endorsing Tom Price: Does the AMA owe us an explanation?

Policy
December 8, 2016

On Tuesday, November 29, President-elect Donald Trump named Dr. Tom Price, a former orthopedic surgeon, current Republican congressman, and chair of the House Budget Committee, as his pick for Secretary of Health and Human Services.

The same day, the American Medical Association issued a press release enthusiastically endorsing Price for the position.

The next day, Dr. Andrew Gurman, the president of the AMA, came to my …

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Endorsing Tom Price: Does the AMA owe us an explanation?

Ignore the economists: Keep the yearly physical

Physician
November 25, 2016

In the years since the medical community first got revved up on the idea of “value-based care” — the conceptual antithesis of the “more is better” fee-for-service model — a common target of criticism has been the routine physical, one of the most time-honored traditions in medicine.

The attacks come from all angles: The annual check-up isn’t cost-effective, it doesn’t lead to better outcomes, it actually might lead …

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Ignore the economists: Keep the yearly physical

Why hospitals shouldn’t use their miracle cases to advertise

Physician
September 16, 2016

On the way to work the other day, I heard a radio commercial advertising a local hospital network’s cardiac care services. In it, a patient’s daughter related her overwhelmingly positive experience with the hospital team that treated her 90-year-old father with a transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR), a minimally-invasive alternative to open heart surgery.

It was a good commercial. It had all the elements: “I was worried at first, the doctors …

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Why hospitals shouldn’t use their miracle cases to advertise

The cure for a poor historian? A good medical record

Physician
September 4, 2016

Think keeping your life organized is hard? Try keeping your doctors organized.

In this era of fragmented health care, patients find themselves in the impossible position of having to coordinate their care themselves — a task that many can’t meet. Having multiple chronic medical conditions often means being subjected to a dizzying assortment of specialists, medical terminology, and tests that can quickly overwhelm patients.

How many times have you found yourself in …

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The cure for a poor historian? A good medical record

Access to guns is easy. Access to trauma care is becoming more difficult.

Physician
August 4, 2016

Now that the dust has settled in the wake of America’s most recent mass shooting, the odds seem high that history will repeat itself, and our legislature will again fail to enact any meaningful reform.

Like it or not, we as a country, through our elected representatives, have decided that we value unfettered access to deadly weapons over an individual’s right to feel safe in public spaces. Why …

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Access to guns is easy. Access to trauma care is becoming more difficult.

An open letter to Macklemore about the opioid epidemic

Physician
June 3, 2016

Dear Macklemore,

Recently, you — the white-rapping, thrift-shopping, LGBT-activist-ing, Grammy-winning 2013 phenom — teamed up with President Obama to deliver a message to the country about the current opioid epidemic. Now let me preface this by saying, I like you, Macklemore. I like the mixture of equal parts political, earnest and downright goofy that you bring to your music. I like that you seem genuinely …

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An open letter to Macklemore about the opioid epidemic

Foreign medical graduates get a raw deal. Here’s why.

Education
May 23, 2016

On my recent tour of residency programs, I had the pleasure of meeting many foreign medical graduates (a.k.a. FMGs; not to be confused with international medical graduates, who are U.S. citizens who go abroad for medical school).

Almost uniformly, they struck me as confident, mature and articulate. Many were older than me, some by as much as 10 or 15 years. Most had extensive research experience, and a few had even …

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Foreign medical graduates get a raw deal. Here’s why.

Academic medical centers balance dollars with resident education

Education
April 26, 2016

Medicine has a fraught relationship with money. Dealing as they do with matters of life and death, doctors are loath to assign a dollar value to human life, preferring to avoid the subject altogether and instead provide the care that they deem appropriate no matter the cost. Insurance companies, on the other hand, make their business in rationing health dollars and have no such qualms: the consensus among them is …

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Academic medical centers balance dollars with resident education