Tag: attitude

Doctors more likely to misdiagnose patients who are jerks

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❝ Going to see the doctor can bring out the worst in people. Being sick and fitting an appointment into an overcrowded schedule can be stressful. So can a long sit in the colorless cube of a waiting room.

But if you’ve ever given a doctor attitude, next time you might want to think twice — or risk being misdiagnosed.

That’s the implication of two new studies published in the journal BMJ Quality & Safety. Separately, the authors demonstrated that clinicians are more likely to make errors of judgment when they’re treating frustrating and difficult patients…

❝ The researchers suspected physicians’ mental resources are so taxed from thinking about how to deal with tricky patients that their ability to process medical information becomes impaired. “If resource depletion affects simpler, everyday problems,” they wrote, “it is not surprising that these highly complex cognitive processes are impaired if a substantial proportion of mental resources is seized by the confrontation with emotional experiences triggered by patients’ troublesome behaviors…”

❝ From the patient perspective, leaving any attitude outside the doctor’s office is probably a good idea, lest you risk being misdiagnosed.

I’ll second that emotion.

RTFA for an outline of the two studies. Actually, the suggestion is useful in many a context. I’d suggest you treat your doctor like a friendly, professional; but, overworked copper. And vice versa.

Politeness counts.

Folks are starting to tell the boss — Take this job and shove it!

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BLS, quitting

More Americans are leaving their jobs voluntarily…

The number of people quitting their jobs has risen sharply this year, even as relatively few people have been laid off or fired.

One of the more predictable consequences of the terrible economy over the last several years was that people who had a job were holding onto it for dear life. But in a sign that the job market is coming to life, the number of people quitting their job voluntarily has soared this year, even as the number being fired or laid off has remained low.

In other words, Americans appear more confident that they can find a better job than they did even a few months ago, giving them more freedom to escape terrible hours, an obnoxious boss or a too-low salary for something else. That could be a harbinger of workers having stronger leverage in pay negotiations in the months ahead.

RTFA – click the link above and wander through a larger article entitled “Five Economic Trends To Be Thankful For”. This portion tripped my trigger more than the others. Though, they all make sense.

Most of this is the result of what has become traditional Keynesian economic policies – mostly as tweaked by Ben Bernanke who took a very courageous leap. Especially since he kept warning throughout the passage of time – punctuated by idjits voting NO – the ultimate responsibility of rebuilding our economy was political and legislative.

The White House types get a smaller piece of the credit – since they rarely acted up as much as they should have and could have in early days when even the dolts in the Republican Party were close to admitting their share of responsibility for the disaster that has become the Great Recession.

Young woman in famous tsunami photo looks for renewal

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Click on photo to enlarge

The young Japanese woman clutches a beige blanket tight around her shoulders as she stares into the distance. Behind her hulks twisted metal and splintered wood left by the tsunami that devastated Ishinomaki, her hometown.

The photograph, taken by Tadashi Okubo at the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, was picked up by Reuters and other agencies around the world, becoming an iconic image of the March 11 disaster that killed 20,000 people.

The woman’s name is Yuko Sugimoto. She is now 29 years old.

When the photo was taken, around 7 a.m. on March 13, she was looking in the direction of her son Raito’s kindergarten, which was partly submerged and surrounded by piles of debris. Nearly two days after the quake she had yet to find the four-year-old.

“At that point, I thought there was only about a 50 percent chance he was alive,” she recalled recently. “Some people told me the children at the kindergarten were rescued, but others told me that somebody had seen the children all swept away by the tsunami…”

Reunited with her husband the next day, the two began making the rounds of evacuation centers — first by car, then by bicycle as fuel ran out. Her husband found a boat and paddled his way towards the kindergarten, but found no one there.

It wasn’t until the next day that the couple heard that their son and other children had been rescued by the military from the roof of the kindergarten the morning after the tsunami.

“When I saw Raito in the corner of a room, the next moment I was weeping so hard I couldn’t see anything,” Sugimoto said.

She hugged him and checked his hands, his feet, every bit of his body. She even checked his smell, to be certain it really was him. Holding him tight, she said “Thank goodness, thank goodness,” over and over.

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