Blargh.

Slate has published an article about the horrible dangers of night residents who have no clue what is going on with their patients rather than residents who are nearly delirious from no sleep. While I understand the journalistic impulse to notify people of problems caused by supposed solutions to other problems and disturbing reader assumptions the entire article annoyed me tremendously.

Medical error is a massive cause of injury and death in this country and we have done nothing to systematically address it. Every single incident the author describes here could be handled by electronic health records that kept information about a patient in one place rather than allowing things like major allergies to appear on scrawled notes that aren't even with their chart. Rather then address this, the article chooses to try and blame a system that forces a patient to be handed off to different doctors. Is there any conceivable system of providing comprehensive medicine that doesn't require patients to be handed off at some point? No, especially not in today's hospital system, but the author would rather ignore this fact and write a piece filled with nostalgia for those halcyon days when people who were nearly delirious with lack of sleep were responsible for our health. Nostalgia is almost never a solution to a problem, neither is ignoring systematic issues.

The Freakonomics blog's comments on disruptive kids in classrooms is a great example of this. The more information we get the more of a problem disruptive kids seem to be and the more disruptive children seem to be very linked to domestic abuse, which means that there are some institutional problems with our schools that turn out to be almost completely unsolvable by the age old arguements about stupid vs. smart kids or good vs. not good schools. The same is true of new information that seems to imply that socio-economic status has far more to do with educational outcomes than the quality of school does. As it turns out smart, well-off kids generally do just as well in the low income schools as the do in the schools populated by other smart, well-off kids. These are interesting studies that are trying to understand larger things about our culture and how it works. It isn't that hard to think, people.

Also annoying me is the entire thread caused by Adbuster's rant about hipsters. Just read the first comment on this blog post because I don't feel like another rant now. I will, however, give Slate some props for their article about the new military generals.