In this episode, Elisha moves to Seattle to work as a hospitalist in a multi-hospital system — the complete opposite end of the spectrum of care from what he had just been experiencing as a hospitalist in a rural hospital in small-town Kansas.

In his role in Seattle, Elisha encounters two more major systemic flaws in the medical system:

1. Patients being subjected to continued treatment beyond what is kind or beneficial. Regularly, Elisha was faced with being one of many physicians on a patient’s case and being faced with a position where the patient’s quality of life was diminishing or just completely gone, but the families or decision makers who were looking for some sort of hope were continually sold on extended measures of care by other physicians in the system. This situation time and time again prolonged patients’ suffering, gave family members false hope, and wracked up more and more debt that would eventually fall to the family to pay once the patient had died.

2. Patients being irresponsibly and unnecessarily admitted to the hospital without any treatment or method of intervention even being attempted before admitting them. Elisha gives several examples of this, including those with incorrect information like the patient that was supposedly unresponsive, who Elisha found to be sitting up, conscious and coherent, having no idea why they’d admitted him, even though he resisted the admittance.

Through his time in Seattle, Elisha was exposed to incredibly diverse and difficult cases, which helped him learn an immense amount. However, he also got a look into the bowels of the profit-seeking nature of the larger healthcare beast in a way that would change his professional trajectory.

More on that next week…

Watch or listen in to get a peak behind the curtain of what really goes into becoming a doctor in America and how that influences the healthcare the American public actually receives.

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Credits:

Dr. Elisha Yaghmai, M.D. - Host, Executive Producer

Jo O'Hanlon - Host, Set Design, Producer

Monica Salmeron - Director, Producer

Ben Laffen - Videographer

Austin Engler - Video Editor

Harmony Marketing - Marketing & Production

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Dear Healthcare, It’s You — A new podcast investigating the broken U.S. Healthcare system.

Why is it failing? How are you getting screwed over? Who is profiting? How can it change?

Season 1 starts off with internal medicine physician Dr. Elisha Yaghmai's story. As a medical student and beyond, Elisha begins to discover the systemic toxicity & failings of the US healthcare model and those discoveries have shaped his life's work and purpose: To find a better way.

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Available on YouTube and major podcast platforms.

--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/dearhealthcare/message