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- “To the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world.”
Anonymous
The American College of Radiology, of which I am a member, recommends, among other things, that an ambulatory patient not have a preoperative chest x-ray (CXR) unless acute cardiopulmonary disease is suspected or unless there is a history of chronic stable cardiopulmonary disease in a patient over 70 who has not had a CXR within 6 months.
I recently wrote about this matter.
The essay was posted at a popular online site for physicians:
https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2019/11/what-if-you-are-one-of-the-2-percent.html
One of the subsequent comments to the post read: “You’ve got it all wrong here. Our responsibility is not to improve the health of individual patients, but to ensure that limited healthcare resources are doled out carefully. Think of all the administrative salaries that could be paid out of the money spent on X rays for pre-op patients. Clearly that’s more important that improving the management of 2% of those patients…”
What if, at a different time and in a different place, it had been a numbers game?
It does seem that, at least in certain circumstance in Earth’s history, the Almighty is amenable to persuasion (or, perhaps better…
