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Is the new professionalism and ACP's new ethics really just about following guidelines?

The Charter ( Medical Professionalism in the New Millennium.A Physician's Charter) did not deal with just the important relationship of ...

Sunday, August 07, 2011

Aggregate Healthiness, Gross Body Health,Keynesian Medicine

I have ranted and sometime more reflectively argued quietly against the morality of the aggregate as it applies to medical practice. Rules,pay for performance (now re branded as value based purchasing) rely on the statistical aggregates and often overly simplified guidelines. I know, aggregates can be useful in a number of contexts but the individual patient ( what other kind of patient is there?) may have her interest devoured by obsession with rules based on the statistical abstractions.

Here, George Mason Economist,Don Boudreaux, tells a satirical tale about a medical analogue to Keynesian aggregate demand.

No, the fictional gross body health is not exactly what I argue about with the guideline-P4P thrust in clinical medicine but Boudreaux's commentary is worth reading.

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