Author Archives: Brian

You’ve heard or seen the pitch.  You’re encouraged to get a full body scan or an ultrasound of different parts of your body to make sure that you are healthy.  The pain free procedure is touted as your way of taking charge of your health and finding problems before they start.  It seems simple enough.  So what’s the problem? The Problem With Full Body Scans Part of the problem is that our bodies are quite complex and there can be areas of abnormalities seen with these scanners.  The vast majority of the time these abnormalities are benign and nothing to worry about. They won’t cause a person any harm if left alone and had the individual not done a full body scan, he would have lived a normal life and died none the bit wiser. Unfortunately, once an abnormality is found and identified many people are disturbed and insist on […] Read More »

The fundamental challenge facing all countries to delivering healthcare is balancing these three aspects: cost of care, access to care, and the quality of care provided. This is known as the iron triangle of healthcare. Unfortunately, the truth is that only two of these three areas can be optimized. For example, if a nation chose to provide high quality care to all, then the costs must be high as well. If instead a healthcare system was designed to be low cost but give high quality care, access to care would need to be limited. Finally if a country wanted to have a low cost healthcare system with universal access, the quality delivered would not be high quality. The US Healthcare Crisis The healthcare crisis in America is particularly startling when you realize that the United States does the worst on all three aspects. We have the highest cost per capita, […] Read More »