Aaron the Internist is awesome
January 24th, 2016
One of my good friends and fellow Harvard alumni is an internist and part time champion of rare disease prevention and awareness. For those not in medical field, an internist is a internal medicine physician (read more) with a strong focus on diagnosis. Ohhh proper diagnosis, how rare it is!
Aaron’s been helping me lately with contacting medical centers to learn more about their procedures for detecting and diagnosing autism in patients. Obviously without someone on the inside, this is a futile pursuit. We basically contacted any clinics hiring IM physicians in several states using job listing sites (Florida, California, Massachusetts, Chicago, New York, Texas, Pennsylvania) and were able to find someone willing to talk to Aaron based on his credentials and existing connections. I fielded the questions and took notes and will be thinking through my follow up writing ideas to address others in the autism community.
The life of an internist is a highly engaging hustle and bustle. I’m glad I have someone to ping thoughts and ideas off of, thanks Aaron.
ASD to Gain Recognition with Medical Health Insurers
February 11th, 2015
If you keep an eye on Capitol Hill festivities, then you probably saw this week that congress has successfully pushed through a bill requiring health insurers to cover autism detection and treatment.
Not surprisingly, the bill hit resistant amongst Tea Party senators. Their argument “why not let the free market decide for itself what to cover” speaks volumes of their lack of awareness, empathy, and understanding of ASD – maybe better to just call it plain ignorance. The reason the free market can’t choose to cover ASD is because it is one of the most misunderstood and disproportionally studied disorders that exists. Health insurers have a huge blind spot and they know looking left or right will only cost them profits that are difficult to pass onto insurance plans. Over the past decade, the detection and treatment of ASD has been slowly creeping into physician fields requirements for new hires in areas such as Internal Medicine and Family Medicine, so I don’t see any reason to fret and marginalize this disorder as cherry-picking or “special treatment”.