Clinical Associate Professor Emeritus of Medicine

Overview

Dr Poses went to Brown University as an undergraduate, and got his medical degree from the same university. He did an internship and residency in internal medicine at University Hospital in Boston, and a fellowship in general internal medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr Poses became an enthusiastic proponent of evidence-based medicine, the idea that physicians should practice medicine in the best interests of their patients based not only on their knowledge of biology and traditional medicine, but also on combining the findings obtained by critical review of the best available clinical research with consideration of the individual patients' values and needs. His research focused on how physicians make judgments and decisions, and why they often do not make them according to the precepts of evidence-based medicine. He also did original clinical and health outcomes research.
In the late 1990s, Dr Poses performed a qualitative study involving interviews of health care professionals about what they thought had gone wrong with health care. The results were that physicians felt that their core values were under external threat, and were able to identify examples of threats, most deriving from concentration and abuse of power in health care. He was able to find numerous cases that embodied such threats by searching the news media, but found that the issues they raised were rarely discussed in the national media, and were mostly ignored by scholarly health care and medical publications. Therefore, he and colleagues launched a blog to discuss these issues, entitled Health Care Renewal, http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/. Dr Poses is now also President of FIRM - the Foundation for Integrity and Responsibility in Medicine, a not-for-profit organization (NGO) designed to raise awareness of external threats to the core values in health care as the first step toward addressing them.

Brown Affiliations