Pat McNees

5 Things I Didn't Know About Health Care (Until I Got Sick) (C. Coville, Cracked Columnists, 3-11-14) "Sick people with potentially curable illnesses are shunted around between separate specialists who don't pay attention to anything except the body part they've been trained to focus on, a problem known as care fragmentation... Because of care fragmentation, sick people often have to coordinate their own care if they want to get treated correctly. But that's not as easy as it sounds, because ..."

The Girl Who Turned to Bone (Carl Zimmer, The Atlantic, 5-22-13). Unexpected discoveries in the quest to cure an extraordinary skeletal condition show how medically relevant rare diseases can be. A long and fascinating read.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science by David H. Freedman (The Atlantic, Nov. 2010). "Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors--to a striking extent--still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science." On PLoS Medicine you can read Ioannidis's article, Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.

Pulse: Voices From the Heart of Medicine - The First Year, ed. Paul Gross and Diane Guernsey (excellent essays, poems and short narratives from the hearts and in the voices of patients and their health care providers, from the online magazine Pulse)