A Country Doctor Writes:

“We must bear in mind the difference between thoroughness and efficiency. Thoroughness gathers all the facts, but efficiency distinguishes the two-cent pieces of non-essential data from the twenty-dollar gold pieces of fundamental fact.”

Dr. William Mayo

The practice of medicine involves a lot of details, but details without the big picture are meaningless at best and distracting at worst.

The expression “The Devil is in the Detail(s)” implies that the details can trip you up, whereas the original, older, idiom “God is in the Detail(s)” conveys the importance, even beauty or virtue, of paying attention to the details when trying to do good work.

I think medicine has lost sight of the big picture when it comes to its thoroughness and its pursuit of efficiency. And I don’t see much beauty or virtue in today’s medical charts.

This was going on before electronic medical records, but quantum leaped with the switch from transcribed dictation to click boxes and copy-and-paste functionalities.

The root of this problem lies with the Evaluation and Management (E&M) coding that literally gives points for how many questions a doctor asks about a symptom – onset, character, duration, severity and so on. Points are also given for documenting which symptoms a patient doesn’t have. In earlier times, we used the phrase “pertinent negatives” for items a reasonable physician would want to know in order to work through the possible differential diagnoses for a particular symptom

With the reimbursement system we now have, the number of questions and physical exam items, regardless of whether they are relevant or just filler material, drives physicians’ income and practices’ bottom line.

It was often possible when reading an old-fashioned, dictated, narrative to relatively quickly sort through the irrelevant items, particularly if the style and grammar were used to provide emphasis. For example, when dictating, you had the option of grouping all the negatives together and of keeping the positives separate and emphasized. With an EMR, the items in structured data entry fields tend to come in a predetermined order, making it much harder for the reader to find the relevant items.

The forest of details in today’s medical record serves purposes other than the efficient documentation for doctors to remember their own inquiry and thought processes. It also isn’t primarily designed for doctors to communicate to each other what they have observed and how they propose to treat it.

Today, under the new Government edicts, medical records have to contain hoards of details doctors never thought were relevant, but politicians and insurance actuaries do and future generations of researchers might. Plaintiffs’ lawyers and medical boards might need them, and patients need to be able to read them, so we can no longer create notes that efficiently document our findings, conclusions and plans. It is as if the conductor’s sheet music at the Symphony could no longer have musical notes, G-clefs and technical terms like “mezzo forte”, in case a non-musician wanted to follow along with the orchestra.

It is a bizarre situation: Imagine the Ministry of Culture requiring that all poetry contain certain elements about the beauty of America and the threat of global warming. Similar things have happened in countries that shall not be named here.

This is where the religious analogy really plays out: Which higher power decides the relative importance of what details in medical records? I have a theory.

Details, details, details…

“Once you start studying medicine you never get through with it.”

Dr. Charles Mayo

Marcus Welby, M.D. was 62 in the first episode of the TV series. My father, not a physician, retired at 62. As I am now beginning my sixty-second year, I seem to be thinking a lot about my place in time and in medicine.

Thirty years ago people often told me I looked too young to be a doctor, and I felt I had to work extra hard to seem wise. I developed a habit of carefully explaining what I understood of each patient’s condition, what I saw as the options for further testing and treatment, and what I expected the outcome to be. I also made a point of being respectful and seeking out each patient’s views and preferences.

That is still how I work, but I have found that over time, as my appearance more and more plainly suggests my years in the business, patients are more and more willing to take my advice with fewer explanations. They are also more openly seeking my opinions, support and advice in matters that go beyond the purely medical aspects of life.

It is an honor and a humbling responsibility to be in that position. It comes from not only looking like you have lived through a lot, and I have, but also from being privileged to see up close the joys and travails of so many fellow human beings.

Few professions see as much of the human condition as we physicians, and especially in these secular times, our role can sometimes have similarities with that of the village priest, especially because we deal with matters of birth, life and death.

Early on, I wrote a post titled “The Apostolic Nature of Our Profession”. The older I get in my vocation, the more I see of that; I feel more kinship and indebtedness to the ancient physicians and to my own mentors that guided me to where I am now, and I feel more tangibly the responsibility that goes with years of practice, suddenly graying hair and the earnest requests from some of my patients to fill their archetypal need for the services of a physician.

At the same time, I feel a strengthening of my desire to understand more of medicine. This truly is a lifelong pursuit, and every year I know more, but also wish for deeper and deeper knowledge than I have achieved. Dr. Charles Mayo said it succinctly in the quote above, and Sir William Osler elaborated eloquently:

“The hardest conviction to get in the mind of a beginner is that the education upon which he is engaged is not a college course, not a medical course, but a life course, for which the work of a few years under teachers is but a preparation.”

Like Osler, I believe medicine is a genuine calling for many physicians, but unlike him, I believe it can be practiced into old age, as long as we have the physical and mental vigor this kind of work requires.

I bring the enthusiasm of a young man and the experience of a sixty-one year old to my remote clinic five days a week, and most nights and weekends I read, think and write about doctoring.

I hold these words by Dr. William Mayo close to my heart as I imagine myself following in the footsteps of mentors like my senior colleague Dr. Wilford Brown, III:

“The keen clinician, as he grows in experience, becomes more and more valuable as age advances.”

In order to be as valuable as I can be to my patients thirty-five years after medical school, I need to read a lot. I need to read the major medical journals not only to learn what applies directly to my everyday work, but also to be cognizant of how the basic sciences are evolving. I need to translate my life experience and what I have learned from well over 100,000 patient encounters into a language with many dialects that I can use in familiar and unfamiliar situations with patients from a multitude of backgrounds. I need to continually learn about psychology, philosophy and religion in order to be a support to patients who face life altering circumstances and diseases.

I need to maintain my equanimity through busy clinic days in our tumultuous national health care environment, so that my patients don’t become pawns in the system any more than they have to. I need to maintain my sense of proportion in everything I do: in differential diagnosis, in helping patients set priorities, in managing agendas imposed on me by “the system”, and in my own expectations as only one mere human.

This is what I hope to continue to bring to work with me every day for as long as I can do it well.

Question: What do you do when presented with abnormal lab results?

Answer: Ask lots of questions.

The nursing home just sent over a urinalysis on a patient of Dr. Carlyle. I am covering his practice for a few days. The test showed that an 82 year old woman had 3+ white blood cells in her urine. “NKDA” was written in the margin, indicating she had no allergies.

I sighed internally and called the nursing home. The charge nurse seemed a little surprised at all my questions.

“What are the symptoms? What is the patient’s kidney function? Is she on blood thinners or any other medications that might interact with an antibiotic?”

The presence of bacteria or white blood cells in the urine should not usually be treated if there are no symptoms. That’s not always been our belief, but most doctors agree with this approach today.

Looking at a test result without knowing the story behind it, we cannot decide whether or how to act.

Last week we got a critically high potassium result on a patient with normal kidney function and no prescription medications in her profile. I did nothing about it, except order a repeat test that was normal. The obvious explanation was hemolysis; red blood cells contain more potassium than the serum that transports them and if the cells break during blood draw or handling of the vial, serum potassium will be falsely elevated.

A seizure patient of Dr. Carlyle had a high phenytoin level. I pestered the nurse to give me several past results and to track any previous dose changes. It turned out this patient had stable levels for a year and a half and suddenly had a low level last month. Dr. Carlyle raised the dose. In retrospect, the patient probably had missed a few doses, and would have been fine staying on the same dose. I dropped the prescribed dose back down and expect the patient to do fine.

A hypothyroid patient, Diane Green, was hospitalized with abdominal distention and constipation. She is nonverbal, and fearful of medical procedures. The hospitalist checked her thyroid function, as undertreated hypothyroidism can contribute to constipation. The test suggested Diane needed a higher dose, so she was discharged on a substantially increased dose of levothyroxine. As soon as I saw her again, I reversed the medication change; her TSH had been normal one week before her admission, and a severe illness or traumatic experience can affect thyroid values. I figured the hospitalist did not notice Diane’s old TSH result in the hospital computer.

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 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.”

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle