Pelzman’s Picks: Are First Responders Racially Biased?

• Do emergency medical responders discriminate against patients based on race? A recent analysis indicates that may be the case, writes Kristian Foden-Vencil ~ Emergency Medical Responders Confront Racial Bias (Kaiser Health News)
• What have been the unanticipated consequences of electronic health records? Abraham Verghese, MD, Nigam H. Shah, MBBS, PhD, and Robert A. Harrington, MD, discuss ongoing implementation issues and challenges surrounding the technology ~ What This Computer Needs Is a Physician (JAMA)
• Faith T. Fitzgerald, MD, recalls how one patient dealt with the knowledge that she was dying ~ The Apocalypse (Annals of Internal Medicine)
• “Editing the genome of human gametes or embryos is a disruptive unactualized technology,” write Eli Y. Adashi, MD, and I. Glenn Cohen, JD ~ The Ethics of Heritable Genome Editing (JAMA)
• Are the benefits of a new cholesterol lowering drug worth the price tag? Mark A. Hlatky, MD, explores the trade-off ~ A Pound of Prevention? Assessing the Value of New Cholesterol-Lowering Drugs (Annals of Internal Medicine)
• Carl E. Bartecchi, MD, reflects on his time as a physician during the Vietnam War ~ Healing the Wounds (Annals of Internal Medicine)
• “His gaze drifts toward the floor when he describes the chemotherapy, the hospitalizations, the pain,” writes Jeffrey H. Millstein, MD, recounting a patient’s memory of his son’s battle with cancer ~ The Envelope (JAMA)

Fred N. Pelzman, MD, of Weill Cornell Internal Medicine Associates and weekly blogger for MedPage Today, follows what’s going on in the world of primary care medicine. Pelzman’s Picks is a compilation of links to blogs, articles, tweets, journal studies, opinion pieces, and news briefs related to primary care that caught his eye.

last updated 01.15.2019