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Another Facet of the Health Care Crisis: Miserable Doctors
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Not only are doctors becoming increasingly, frighteningly scarce, but they’re also hating life. A recent survey of 11,950 primary care docs and specialists done by the Physicians’ Foundation found that 60 percent would not recommend medicine as a career, while 42 percent said professional morale is either “poor” or “very low.”
The reasons for all this depression can be boiled down to insurance companies and policy headaches:
“The reported reasons for the widespread frustration among physicians include increased time dealing with non-clinical paperwork, difficulty receiving reimbursement and burdensome government regulations. Physicians say these issues keep them from the most satisfying aspect of their job: patient relationships.” http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
Food for thought, Obama? As for all those Medicare cut proposals being thrown around, 82 percent said their practices would be “unsustainable” if pay cuts were made. A whopping 94 percent reported that the time they spend on non-clinical paperwork has gone up in the past three years, with 63 percent saying the paperwork leads to less time spent on each patient.http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
And of course, there’s the shortage, which is already alive and well: 78 percent of the physicians surveyed believe there’s an existing dearth of primary care doctors, while 49 percent say they plan to reduce the number of patients they see, or even stop practicing over the next three years. Yikes. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Monday, November 24, 2008
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
self-interest 550.sel.188 louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
In the play "A Streetcar Named Desire," Blanche Dubois declares that she has always depended on the kindness of strangers. Fat lot of good that did her.
Yet those who hope to avoid Ms. Dubois' tragic mistakes need not wallow in a pool of distrust and selfishness. Successful social animals, from capuchin monkeys to college students, often heed the injunction that "one good turn deserves another," even with strangers, according to two new studies.http://myface.com/Louis_J_Sheehan
Pairs of capuchins cooperate to obtain food even if only one of them has direct access to it, say Frans B.M. de Waal and Michelle L. Berger, both of Emory University in Atlanta. The monkey that captures the meal shares with the helper as a kind of payment for services rendered, de Waal and Berger propose.
People take beneficial exchanges even further, contend Kevin A. McCabe and Vernon L. Smith, both economists at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Even college students well versed in economic theories that treat only selfish strategies as rational often cooperate with anonymous partners to win money in laboratory games, McCabe and Smith say.
Players assigned to lead off in these games appear to try building a good reputation by giving cooperation a go, thus encouraging an exchange of favors over more selfish ploys, the researchers theorize.
The survival value of cooperative behavior in capuchins exposes the deep evolutionary roots of this essential element of human society, de Waal says. "[Capuchins'] tendency to share after successful joint efforts to obtain food may be the result of psychological mechanisms as complex as displaying gratitude for receiving help or as simple as feeling positively toward a cooperative partner."
De Waal and Berger studied seven same-sex pairs of capuchins. Members of a pair were unfamiliar to each other. A pair entered a chamber, one animal on each side of a mesh screen. An experimenter placed two transparent food bowls, one containing apple slices, on a single weighted tray in front of the monkeys. Each monkey could reach a pull bar connected to the tray.
When the strength of both animals was required to pull the tray within reach, the monkey that got the food regularly broke up some into bits and let the partner grab it through openings in the screen. If each monkey pulled in a bowl of fruit pieces, or if only one had a bar to draw in the food-bearing tray, sharing rarely occurred, the scientists report in the April 6 Nature.
For college students, McCabe and Smith use a more complicated test procedure in which the volunteers were hidden from their partners. In their "trust game," player 1 can opt to split $20 evenly with a partner and quickly end the game or to let player 2 choose between either a mutually beneficial or a selfish outcome. If given the chance, player 2 can cooperate (yielding $15 for player 1 and a $25 personal gain) or claim all $40, leaving player 1 penniless.
If self-interest rules, as in much economic theory (SN: 3/28/98, p. 205), then player 1 should consistently settle for half of $20 rather than trust player 2 to divvy up a larger amount.http://myface.com/Louis_J_Sheehan
However, among 24 undergraduate pairs playing this game a single time, player 1 deferred to player 2 in half the tests. Player 2 cooperated in 9 of those 12 pairs, McCabe and Smith report in the March 28 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Among 28 pairs of economics graduate students, mostly male, player 1 deferred to player 2 in 21 pairs and got a cooperative response on 16 occasions. Cooperation fell when partners switched roles for a second round, but it still occurred most of the time, McCabe and Smith say.http://myface.com/Louis_J_Sheehan
Mutual deals that include expectations of return favors in the future constantly occur in stable societies, they assert. "This is not a sentimental proclivity but a characteristic of realistic assumptions that players make about each other based on long-term self-interest," the researchers conclude.
Yet those who hope to avoid Ms. Dubois' tragic mistakes need not wallow in a pool of distrust and selfishness. Successful social animals, from capuchin monkeys to college students, often heed the injunction that "one good turn deserves another," even with strangers, according to two new studies.http://myface.com/Louis_J_Sheehan
Pairs of capuchins cooperate to obtain food even if only one of them has direct access to it, say Frans B.M. de Waal and Michelle L. Berger, both of Emory University in Atlanta. The monkey that captures the meal shares with the helper as a kind of payment for services rendered, de Waal and Berger propose.
People take beneficial exchanges even further, contend Kevin A. McCabe and Vernon L. Smith, both economists at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Even college students well versed in economic theories that treat only selfish strategies as rational often cooperate with anonymous partners to win money in laboratory games, McCabe and Smith say.
Players assigned to lead off in these games appear to try building a good reputation by giving cooperation a go, thus encouraging an exchange of favors over more selfish ploys, the researchers theorize.
The survival value of cooperative behavior in capuchins exposes the deep evolutionary roots of this essential element of human society, de Waal says. "[Capuchins'] tendency to share after successful joint efforts to obtain food may be the result of psychological mechanisms as complex as displaying gratitude for receiving help or as simple as feeling positively toward a cooperative partner."
De Waal and Berger studied seven same-sex pairs of capuchins. Members of a pair were unfamiliar to each other. A pair entered a chamber, one animal on each side of a mesh screen. An experimenter placed two transparent food bowls, one containing apple slices, on a single weighted tray in front of the monkeys. Each monkey could reach a pull bar connected to the tray.
When the strength of both animals was required to pull the tray within reach, the monkey that got the food regularly broke up some into bits and let the partner grab it through openings in the screen. If each monkey pulled in a bowl of fruit pieces, or if only one had a bar to draw in the food-bearing tray, sharing rarely occurred, the scientists report in the April 6 Nature.
For college students, McCabe and Smith use a more complicated test procedure in which the volunteers were hidden from their partners. In their "trust game," player 1 can opt to split $20 evenly with a partner and quickly end the game or to let player 2 choose between either a mutually beneficial or a selfish outcome. If given the chance, player 2 can cooperate (yielding $15 for player 1 and a $25 personal gain) or claim all $40, leaving player 1 penniless.
If self-interest rules, as in much economic theory (SN: 3/28/98, p. 205), then player 1 should consistently settle for half of $20 rather than trust player 2 to divvy up a larger amount.http://myface.com/Louis_J_Sheehan
However, among 24 undergraduate pairs playing this game a single time, player 1 deferred to player 2 in half the tests. Player 2 cooperated in 9 of those 12 pairs, McCabe and Smith report in the March 28 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Among 28 pairs of economics graduate students, mostly male, player 1 deferred to player 2 in 21 pairs and got a cooperative response on 16 occasions. Cooperation fell when partners switched roles for a second round, but it still occurred most of the time, McCabe and Smith say.http://myface.com/Louis_J_Sheehan
Mutual deals that include expectations of return favors in the future constantly occur in stable societies, they assert. "This is not a sentimental proclivity but a characteristic of realistic assumptions that players make about each other based on long-term self-interest," the researchers conclude.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
object Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Many neuroscientists suspect that in order to see, a person first sorts through edges, contours, and other basic visual features using a brain area called the primary visual cortex. Then so-called higher visual areas of the brain assemble these features into perceptions of shapes and objects.
However, according to a new investigation, at least one of these higher areas shapes what we see from the get-go, and it does it by actually suppressing activity in the primary visual cortex. LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.BIZ
This give and take of higher and lower parts of the visual system allows the brain to use predictions about the world, generated from experience and presumably stored in neural structures, to perceive objects under often ambiguous circumstances, propose neuroscientist Scott O. Murray of the University of California, Davis and his coworkers.
"Higher visual areas anticipate the structure of incoming visual information, and if the input matches what's expected, neural activity declines in the primary visual cortex," Murray says.
This is surprising, he adds, because feedback from one brain region to another is typically thought to enhance, rather than inhibit, neural activity. The new findings will appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Murray's group used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure blood-flow changes in the lateral occipital complex (LOC), a higher visual area involved in object recognition, and in the primary visual cortex. LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.BIZ Jumps and dips in blood flow provide indirect markers of neural activity.
In three experiments, a total of 18 adults viewed lines and dots that were perceived as either meaningless jumbles or geometric shapes. Jumbles elicited substantially more activity in the primary visual cortex than in the LOC. In contrast, coherent shapes�especially three-dimensional ones�yielded much stronger LOC responses accompanied by diminished blood flow in the primary visual cortex.
In the first experiment, volunteers saw haphazard lines and drawings of two-dimensional and three-dimensional shapes.
In the second experiment, participants saw three computer displays: a set of stationary, randomly arrayed dots; randomly arrayed dots rotating on an axis around drawings of cubes and other shapes to create three-dimensional perceptions; and dots moving at random.
The third experimental stimulus consisted of a moving diamond on a computer screen, with the diamond's four corners invisible to different degrees. The diamond's four visible segments then moved from side to side on the screen. Volunteers sometimes perceived segments as moving haphazardly and at other times, as moving together as a diamond. All experimental stimuli can be seen at LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.BIZ
The new findings suggest that the primary visual cortex sifts through basic visual elements until the LOC recognizes an object and terminates most low-level activity, remarks neuroscientist Michael S. Beauchamp of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md. Still, he says, other researchers need to confirm the results and see whether a similar pattern of electrical responses occurs in visual areas.
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