Richard Rathe, MD

First let’s define our terms…

“Health is not a deliverable commodity and care does not come out of a system.” – Ivan Illich

I fall back on this quote often because it reminds me of two important concepts:

Health depends on individuals taking responsibility for their own behavior.

Care depends on a relationship between two people (doctor and patient in this context).

Organized “healthcare” interferes with both more often than not!

It is useful to ask the question, “How will we know if healthcare reform has been successful?”

Here are ten scenarios, each dealing with a different aspect of the current US healthcare dilemma. Any major reform must address one or more of these issues without adversely affecting the others. If reformers cannot accomplish this then it’s probably not a good time for reform!

More…

Many clerkship directors are already using a feature of our legacy system called “roll-up”. These evaluations are done in two steps, with initial input from clerkship faculty followed by a summative evaluation completed by the course director. The data from the first step are rolled up and summarized on the summative form. This information is then shared with the student being evaluated and the Office of Student Affairs to inform the “Dean’s Letter” and other assessments.

ModCore takes the best parts of this two step approach and makes it more flexible and effective.Each course/clerkship director first chooses the major and sub-competencies to be evaluated. More…

I remember growing up with the old Food Pyramid. It seemed so obvious to eat more pasta and skip the olive oil. How wrong they were!

In 2004 I wrote a short review of Food Pyramids past, present, and future based on an article by Willett and Stampfer in Scientific American.

Five years later I’ve updated and posted it on my professional site. Bon appetite!

FYI, here’s another review and a longer article on this topic.

See example posted on posted on the MedInfo site.

See the examples posted on the MedInfo site.

Thanks to WordPress, I now have too many blogs to keep up with.

Portions of sites.medinfo.ufl.edu have become the focus of my professional blogging for the time being. I will attempt to cross post articles when appropriate.

Here is one: Core Systems Update

My personal blog richard.rathe.org is also very active.

Welcome to my “revised” site.

I’m in the process of switching from my old static site to WordPress.

The main page from the old site is now the About page for this site.

You may also be interested in my personal Reading Room site.

As they say, “Please pardon our dust!”

RR