Is red wine really good for your heart and your brain?

Patient
January 18, 2011

An excerpt from Beautiful Brain, Beautiful You.  Published by Hyperion. Copyright(c)2011.

by Marie Pasinski, MD

Although much has been written about how red wine in moderation can be good for your heart and your brain, I would like you to reconsider. It’s important to understand that the studies supporting this claim are “observational.” This means they were conducted through self-reported questionnaires inquiring into the drinking habits of a large group of …

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Is red wine really good for your heart and your brain?

Your surgeon may be contemplating suicide

KevinMD
January 18, 2011

I wrote last year in USA Today about the impact of physician burnout.  Not only do doctors suffer, but so do their patients.

Burnout starts early in residency, with entering interns having a depression rate of 4%, similar to the general public.  But after the first year of residency, that number balloons to 25%.

Now, another study adds fuel to this disturbing trend.

A paper published in the Archives of General Surgery …

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Your surgeon may be contemplating suicide

Your blood test and the need for better designed results

Conditions and Diseases
January 18, 2011

Either as a patient or as a physician there’s a very high chance that you’ve ever got your hands on a simple blood test.

These range from very basic ones to complex ones with multiple pages and are substantial to any cinlical evaluation. Blood tests are probably one of the most performed tests in a clinical environment with direct patient contact. Also, if you’ve ever seen a typical blood test from …

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Your blood test and the need for better designed results

How often to see your doctor when feeling well

Patient
January 17, 2011

How often do you see your doctor?  Once a year?  Every 6 months?  Never?  Most of you are pretty healthy and only show up for screening physical exams or aches and pains.  Some of you may have more health problems and come more frequently.

What if you had diabetes, coronary disease, hypertension, high cholesterol, and sleep apnea, but no symptoms to indicate any …

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How often to see your doctor when feeling well

Individual health beliefs play a role in medical decisions

Patient
January 17, 2011

As a family physician, I’ve found that patients’ individual health beliefs often play a big role in important decisions such as starting a new medication or undergoing an invasive test or procedure.

Some patients were more willing to endure potentially risky procedures in order to learn their diagnosis quicker, for example, while others preferred “watchful waiting,” or monitoring symptoms that were unlikely to be a sign of anything serious. Unfortunately, in …

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Individual health beliefs play a role in medical decisions

Quora in health and medicine, what doctors and nurses need to know

Social Media in Medicine
January 17, 2011

by Phil Baumann, RN

What assets do physicians nurse practitioners have which they can share online? It’s knowledge.

With today’s technologies, medicine and nursing care online are obviously limited – perhaps in the future we’ll have technologies which more robustly extend traditional care.

When patients seek information online, they’re usually looking for answers to questions. Now they may be seeking answers from different sources, but if they could find …

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Quora in health and medicine, what doctors and nurses need to know

Should obesity prevention be a personal matter?

Patient
January 17, 2011

Obesity is now increasingly recognized as the “natural” consequence of societal changes that have occurred over the past decades to foster an increasingly obesogenic environment.

Yet, rather than focus on the root causes of these societal drivers of obesity, governments apparently prefer to make obesity prevention a personal matter, with a strong emphasis on trying to get individuals to change their lifestyles.

It is clearly far easier to simply tell people to …

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Should obesity prevention be a personal matter?

Fetal ultrasound and our image oriented society

Patient
January 17, 2011

An excerpt from Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank published by W. W. Norton & Company, 2010 (paperback January 2011).

On eBay, you can buy a fetal ultrasound scrapbook that has a poem on the first page that begins, “I loved you from the start.” It comes with Care Bear stickers. One of them is a pregnant rabbit eating …

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Fetal ultrasound and our image oriented society

Save time and money with your visit with healthcare providers

Physician
January 17, 2011

Have you ever been frustrated by an unproductive or inopportune visit with your doctor that wasted your time and money?

Here are a few tips to keep that from happening again.

The problem

Many visits with healthcare providers are poorly timed and less productive than they could be.  Why?  Because nobody is looking out for you between visits. It’s not that your doctor doesn’t care.  He or she is simply too busy with …

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Save time and money with your visit with healthcare providers

Are malpractice lawsuits really responsible for the rise in C-sections?

Physician
January 16, 2011

by Louise Marie Roth, PhD

About one third of all births in the contemporary United States occur via c-section.  Physicians and the public at large often attribute this to a “malpractice crisis,” whereby obstetricians perform c-sections routinely to avoid malpractice litigation.  Over the last couple of years, I have been conducting research on obstetric practices and malpractice.

One of the things that I have learned …

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Are malpractice lawsuits really responsible for the rise in C-sections?

How cocaine can be used in sinus surgery

Medications
January 16, 2011

Many people are already aware that marijuana is now legal in some states in the US with a medical prescription.

What many people may not realize is that cocaine is also used in medical care, especially in the ENT world.

Cocaine is one of the most potent anesthetic and vasoconstrictor. These two characteristics make it an ideal medication for use during sinus surgery as well as any nasal procedure where bleeding and …

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How cocaine can be used in sinus surgery

Why doctors should profit from dispensing medications

Medications
January 15, 2011

Hold onto your hats. I am about to enter dangerous territory. I am about to suggest maybe doctors should profit from dispensing medications from their office to offset declining reimbursements and rising expenses by using prescriptions as a source of ancillary revenues.

Why dangerous?  For a number of reasons.

One, physicians still grapple with the perception that it is improper for a physician to make money from …

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Why doctors should profit from dispensing medications

What health reform compromise could look like

Health Policy
January 15, 2011

While the rhetoric around health reform has been incendiary from day one, in policy terms, a compromise between Democrats and Republicans using the outline of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has always been available. The two primary problems with the health care system are costs and lack of coverage. The ACA does pretty well on the second, and is a start on the first, but much more is needed. It …

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What health reform compromise could look like

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Alternative medicine and osteopathic medical education

Medical Education
January 14, 2011

by Tayson DeLengocky, DO

There has been a growing public interest in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in recent years. Osteopathic manipulative therapy, a form of physical manipulation of the body for improvement of health and body function, has been designated as complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

According to data reported in 2007 by the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative …

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Alternative medicine and osteopathic medical education

Using failure as motivation for medical residents

Medical Education
January 14, 2011

Dear Dr. Brandt,

As a second year medical student, I know that my peers and I all struggle with what we view as “failure” at some point or another. I imagine this problem doesn’t stop (… ever), especially since medicine seems to attract people who hold themselves to extremely high, if not impossible, standards. If you’re looking for topics, I wonder if you might have some insight to offer on how …

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Using failure as motivation for medical residents

What is a concussion, and what does it mean for the child?

Conditions and Diseases
January 14, 2011

When it comes to football season,  it’s time to think about sports injuries. We frequently have children admitted to the PICU (or to what we call the intermediate or step-down unit) for observation, typically overnight, who have struck their head. They have had concussions. What is a concussion, and what does it mean for the child?

The term itself is centuries old, but even thirty-five years ago, when I was in …

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What is a concussion, and what does it mean for the child?

Obesity and the crossroads between relative health and medical illness

Conditions and Diseases
January 14, 2011

At the end of a busy afternoon, Mrs. MJ was exactly the kind of case I needed.

Two of my patients had come in late but needed to be seen and another was acutely short of breath and refusing to be admitted to the hospital. The chaos had put me almost an hour behind schedule, and I still had to return to the wards to round on my cancer patients. Fortunately …

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Obesity and the crossroads between relative health and medical illness

Blogs encouraging suicides in the gay community

Social Media in Medicine
January 13, 2011

Are reblogs encouraging suicides in the gay community?

Recently, we’ve seen numerous young gay people take their lives. Tumblr went purple and spread the word with 29,294 reblogs. The photo above has 17,300 reblogs. Obama even made an “It gets better” video with 704,000 views.

Is the blogosphere contributing and encouraging this recent suicide epidemic? Are we reblogging the stories of these “martyrs” without actually thinking about what we’re doing in …

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Blogs encouraging suicides in the gay community

How the vaccine and autism scare was a fraud to make money

Medications
January 13, 2011

Most parents and all pediatricians are aware of the 1998 study published in The Lancet by Dr. Andrew Wakefield that mentioned a causal link between measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine and the increased incidence of childhood  autism.  It shook the medical community and created an international movement of parents questioning the extensive combination of immunizations that are given to children.  Could these immunizations be the cause of the increase in …

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How the vaccine and autism scare was a fraud to make money

Legal tobacco and illegal marijuana are historical accidents costing billions

Health Policy
January 13, 2011

“What do you think of medical marijuana?” my mother, who has never smoked a thing in her life, of the tobacco or cannabis variety, asked me one day as we drove through beautiful upstate New York woods.  We had just passed a sign saying “We will destroy your crops,” with a marijuana leaf beneath. “It has its place,” I said.  “No reason to be against it.” “But isn’t marijuana a …

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Legal tobacco and illegal marijuana are historical accidents costing billions

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