A review of life science current events reported by MedCity News this week:Are more than 10 percent of doctors liars? Survey says ‘yes.’ About 11 percent of doctors have knowingly lied to a patient in the last year, according to a new survey published in Health Affairs.15 healthcare Twitter hashtags you should follow. We offer [...]

About 11 percent of doctors have knowingly lied to a patient in the last year, according to a new survey published in Health Affairs.Reasons why doctors lie to patients vary. Nearly 20 percent of physicians said they had not fully disclosed an error to a patient due to fear of malpractice litigation. More than 55 [...]

Rarely, I have fired patients from my practice. Why do I do this? You might think that we send out termination letters to patients who haven’t paid their medical bills. We don’t. We try to work with these folks and will keep seeing them as long as they are making the barest effort to address [...]

The Healing Innovation (HI) blog has spent the last year making the case for greater collaboration between the medical device industry and clinicians. HI, however, has also blogged extensively about the conflicts of interests created by clinicians becoming PR mouthpieces for new products and clinical trial results.Although medical device companies spend large sums of money [...]

Current medical news from today, including when overweight doctors give (and don’t give) diet advice, drug risks and the FDA, and medical products and services on Craigslist.

Digital health incubator Rock Health hosted the 2012 Health Innovation Summit last week in San Francisco. In a series of posts, I’ll be profiling some of the interesting new health companies represented at the summit. You can browse all of the startups I liked from the Rock Health summit here.Hospital discharge papers aren’t enough to [...]

This year began with a breast implant scandal. This one has brought back memories of the one early in my private practice.The current one involves the PIP-branded breast implants produced by the French company Poly Implant Prothese and rebranded by the Dutch company Rofil as Rofil M-implants breast implants. The first one involved silicone implants made by American companies including Dow Corning who no longer makes breast implants.The picture of 3 implants includes: top — an old McGhan double lumen (silicone gel implant surrounded by a saline implant); bottom left ’ Dow Corning textured silicone implant; and bottom right ’ Dow Corning smooth silicone implant. Dow Corning has not made breast implants since approximately 1992.

I was surprised to see the backstory of EPIC Systems of Verona, WI, appear in the New York Times this morning. EPIC is one of the “biggie” electronic medical record systems that boasts 260 customers covering some 127 million patients’ medical records by 2013. The article covers how the company was started and makes sure [...]

An open-heart surgery is an invasive procedure that calls for the rib cage to be spread open — even under the best circumstances, that process can damage nerves, tear ligaments and fracture ribs. But medical device developer Physcient aims to improve on such open-chest procedures with a new approach to old surgical techniques that date [...]

These are caps I made between just before Christmas and the first part of January.The first ones went to @doctorwes after he made his request for photos of Christmas themed clothing seen at work. Here’s a photo (credit) of him and a co-worker wearing the Christmas themed caps I made and sent to him.I then [...]