Not All It’s Cracked Up To Be

A surprisingly bad article has found its way onto the Feb. 17th, 2003 AMNews: ‘Paperless medical record not all it’s cracked up to be’ In summary, it attempts to highlight difficulties with electronic medical records such as data entry, losing touch with the patient and slowing down of ‘busy clinicians’. The assertions in the article are tired old arguments that have been refuted by research or are pseudo-scientific. A response that highlights the absurdity of Dr. Blum’s commentary is as follows: I have serious misgivings about this new way of doing surgery with a thing called Anesthesia. It is a waste of a doctor’s time. I mean what you can accomplish now in 10 minutes with a knife and a strong arm might take hours because of this trendy way of doing things. It just isn’t natural. I’ll miss the screaming, it motivates me to work faster. Screaming allows the patient an outlet for the pain. With Anesthesia? Nothing. Pretty soon, everybody will have to know how to perform surgery because you can take your time. This just isn’t going to work. Why, soon you’ll do nothing but surgery all day long. I’m going to miss the interaction with the patient because of Anesthesia. You won’t be able to tell the patient ‘grit your teeth,’ and ‘this is going to hurt’ while cutting. Yes, I have serious misgivings about Anesthesia.

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