A Country Doctor Writes:

We once had a locum provider who spent a great deal of time reviewing each patient’s record before each visit. He would then enter the room and proceed to “clean up” medication and problem lists. Everything he did was done without eliciting the back story from the patient or the record. All he looked at was the data, never the narrative. Patients were often bewildered, saying “he changed my medicines without even talking to me”.

It may sound great to only act on the facts, but real medicine is a lot messier than that.

Sometimes we prescribe medications for more than one purpose: Amitriptyline may not be the theoretically best drug for neuropathy, but if the patient also has trouble sleeping and a history of migraines, it could solve three problems at once.

And propranolol could be used for migraines, tremors, palpitations and stage fright. It may not be the best beta blocker for the average 70 kg male, but there aren’t many of those around.

A high potassium could be a life threatening emergency or a simple case of hemolysis. Without seeing previous values, a provider could easily overreact.

Or, in the case of the previously stable warfarin patient I recently described, her critical INR seemed out of the blue and there was no vitamin K to be had, so I did nothing except hold the blood thinner. The next value was 1.0 and the home health nurse confessed that her device wasn’t calibrated properly.

Again and again I find that asking why before reacting has saved me and my patient all kinds of trouble, even though it takes time. But it is time well spent.

To quote myself (2014):

Context is crucial when deciding what to do with abnormal test results. But doctors are often pressed for time, and finding the story behind the results takes time. Even when all the data is in our electronic medical records, it takes time to see the patterns: The test results are usually in one place, the prescriptions in another, the office notes in a third, and the phone messages in a fourth. My own EMR (up north) can produce flowsheets with lab results, but each test is identified by the date it was ordered instead of the date it was performed, so correlating lab values with prescription dates becomes confusing, for example when following thyroid cases.

In times past, when solo practice physicians cared for their patients in the office, hospital and nursing home, they kept the threads of context and continuity together more easily. Today, with more providers sharing the care, and with other office staff also interacting with patients and their families, there is more room for errors, gaps and confusion. The tools we have right now are not always as effective as we would like, and they certainly can be cumbersome and slow to use. Reading each other’s notes can take a while, as the EMR format is primarily built for coding and not for ease of following the clinical “story”.

A few words doctor to doctor, doctor to nurse or doctor to patient can sometimes do what half an hour on the computer might not. Treatment without context is essentially just random reflex actions: Killing the innocent bacteria, lowering the falsely elevated potassium, treating the lab value and not the patient – none of it does anybody any good, and probably will cause harm to some unfortunate patients.

Our temptation to view test results as obvious facts in a predictable process instead of possibly misleading clues in a complex mystery reminds me of these words from a Sherlock Holmes novel:

“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”