Fascinating article in the New York Times: How Mindfulness Can Make for Better Doctors. It’s about the results of a study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, that had as its objective “To determine whether an intensive educational program in mindfulness, communication, and self-awareness is associated with improvement in primary care physicians’ well-being, psychological distress, burnout, and capacity for relating to patients.” Not surprisingly, it did improve these metrics among the docs. And, according to the NYT article, “Several of the improvements persisted even after the yearlong course ended. And, those changes correlated with a significant increase in attributes that contribute to patient-centered care, such as empathy and valuing the psychosocial factors that might affect a patient’s illness experience.”

We may just need more of this type of education, even if it is a little “soft” for a lot of grantors. And by we, I’m including you and I, not just docs. (Thanks to Patti Digh for the link on this Thinking Thursday post.)

There’s an interesting post on PharmaGossip called Joint working with the pharmaceutical industry that’s worth a read. It’s about, as the intro says, “the importance of collaborative working between healthcare providers and the pharmaceutical industry - facilitated by medical education agencies - and what this might mean for patient care.”

Just got a press release announcing the North American Association of Medical Education and Communication Companies‘ new officers and board members, who took their new positions at the American Medical Association’s Task Force on Industry/Provider Collaboration, held in Baltimore last week.

The New NAAMECC Board Officers are:

President: Sandra Weaver, MS

President Elect: Chris Bolwell, BSc

Past President: Stephen M. Lewis, MA, CCMEP

Treasurer: Linda Coogle, MBA, CCMEP

Newly elected NAAMECC Board Members are:

Kurt Boyce

Lea Ann Hansen, PharmD

Joseph Kim, MD, MPH

Check out this article from the New York Times: Steps to Greater Accountability in Medical Education. From the article:

“Dr. Murray Kopelow, chief executive of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education, said he would make public “within weeks” a previously confidential listing of classes and companies that violated rules against commercial bias.

And at the urging of a prominent critic who successfully filed a complaint alleging bias in a specific course, Dr. Kopelow said his group was reviewing a proposal that would require educators to notify doctors and furnish corrective materials whenever it is later found that the class material was biased in favor of a drug firm.”

Some medical bloggers have chimed in with their responses, including New York Times Covers Industry Funding of CME from The Carlat Psychiatry Blog. Health Care Renewal provided grist for the NYT mill with this post: Nemeroff, Seroquel, and ACCME.

Something tells me this is not the end of this story…stay tuned. Dr. Kopelow won’t be available for an interview for a week or so, but I hope to catch up with him soon to learn more about releasing the names of violators.

I was so psyched today to get a letter about my editor’s note in our last issue. It was about doctors discussing end-of-life issues (you know, that “death panel” thing), and I really worried about wading into politics. But with healthcare reform in the spotlight, how could I not? Anyway, the letter writer made a great point that I hadn’t thought about.

If you haven’t checked it out, I’d like to invite you to read “Let’s Talk About the Hard Stuff” and let me know what you think here, or at the article site, or via e-mail. Am I totally out to lunch on this one?

Pharma Gossip has put together a good list of clinical evidence sources that can be trusted. Are there any you would add?

According to Wired:

Now, a group of researchers at Harvard University has created the first computer model to automatically detect the risk that a patient is being abused at home. The results were published Sept. 29 in the British Medical Journal.

“It’s a great concept,” said Debra Houry, an emergency physician at Emory University, who was not involved in the research. Although around one in four women experience domestic violence at some point in their lives, she says, the problem often goes unnoticed at a doctor’s visit. “It’s one of those hidden epidemics where they don’t come up to you and disclose the issue.”

But it won’t supplant the need for domestic-violence-related CME:

But screening isn’t the end-all, be-all for victims of domestic violence, says Gene Feder of the University of Bristol. He recently reviewed several trials of screening programs and found that none of them measured whether or not screening led to fewer deaths and injuries among abused women.

“Is [the new computer model] suitable for implementation in in-patient hospital and ER hospital settings without further testing?” he wrote in an e-mail to Wired.com. “Not without suitable training for clinicians in how to ask about abuse of the designated high-risk women and how to manage the women safely.”