A number of media outlets recently featured a story about a Florida general surgeon who removed a normal kidney from a woman who was undergoing spine surgery. How could this have occurred?
The 51-year-old patient who had been injured in a car crash was scheduled for an anterior lumbar interbody fusion (ALIF) of the fifth lumbar to the first sacral vertebra. The general surgeon’s role was to provide …
When I finished my training, I was taught that the vast majority of dementia was Alzheimer’s disease, with occasional cases of multi-infarct dementia as well as odd syndromes such as Kreutzfeld-Jacob disease and genetic, traumatic, toxic and tumor-related syndromes. Parkinson’s disease, we were taught, caused a tremor and freezing up of a person’s movements and only very rarely was associated with any kind of memory loss.
These teachings helped us modern …
Imagine this scenario. Your two-year-old son has had a runny nose for a day or two and an occasional cough, but seemed no worse to you that everyone else in his preschool class. Two hours after you put him to bed you hear him coughing, only this cough is like none you have ever heard from him before. It sounds like a barking seal at the circus — a brassy, …
There is a wealth of information about your health circulating in your blood. For people with diabetes, accessing that information can be a matter of life or death.
For nearly 30 years, the prevailing technology for checking the blood sugars of someone with diabetes has been the fingerstick. People with diabetes are often asked to stick their fingers and check their blood multiple times a day to assess whether their blood …
Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians.
A 79-year-old man is evaluated for pain in the buttocks region. He was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin large B-cell lymphoma 6 months ago. Although his lymphoma has responded well to therapy and he is without evidence of active disease, he required hospitalization three times for chemotherapy-associated complications during his treatment course. He has been …
An excerpt from Dead Execs Don’t Get Bonuse$: The Ultimate Guide to Surviving Your Career With a Healthy Heart.
The details of the careers and tragic deaths of these CEOs are a matter of public record, and the disruption that followed their deaths was enormous. Take Ranjan Das, for example. …
An excerpt from Let Go of Emotional Overeating and Love Your Food: A Five-Point Plan for Success. Copyright © 2018 by Arlene B. Englander. Published by Rowman & Littlefield. All rights reserved.
Anyone who has ever tried to lose weight or keep weight off realizes that evening can be …
Over the last 20 years, physical fitness as a means to improve overall health has increased among the over-40 set. This is great, right? Yes, absolutely. Athletes who remain active as they age do a better job than non-athletes in retaining lean muscle mass. They also show improved bone density, bone structure and bone strength. However, what physicians are seeing are injuries related to the increased level of activity.
One area …
I saw two patients with a chief complaint of bubbles in their urine this month.
One middle-aged woman had eaten some wild mushrooms she was pretty sure she had identified correctly, but once her urine turned bubbly a few days later, she came in to make sure her kidneys were OK.
Even though she was feeling quite well, they were not, and she ended up going straight to Cityside hospital for IV …
I cannot get behind fat acceptance, or better stated in medical lingo as “normalizing obesity.” As a physician and as someone who has been obese or morbidly obese my adult life, I know first hand what it’s like to hate my body and feel ashamed of it. I still do this very moment as I type this, that’s something I have to work on.
Funny thing is, I am much more …
I’m a pathologist and the main way I communicate to the outside world — to your doctor and ultimately to you, the patient is via the pathology report. But the short missives I send from behind the microscope lack any excitement and can fall short of full communication.
Here’s the usual story:
Skin left scapula, biopsy
Nodular basal cell carcinoma
Negative for perineural invasion
Margin status: Positive
Doesn’t sound real interesting, does it?
How about a more …
Everyone always jokes with doctors, “What happens if you get sick?” Some of us laugh off the question. The busy schedule of health care often means our own health comes last. However, what happens when it’s a chronic disease that requires treatment? Then the answer to this question is a little different.
I am a family medicine physician dealing with congenital heart disease (CHD). Saying that someone has congenital heart disease …
There exists a large, mostly-underground, growing community consisting of those iatrogenically harmed by benzodiazepines. Guilty only of following doctors orders, these patients are marginalized and misunderstood. This has been enabled, at least in part, by poor terminology.
Recently on Twitter, Michael P. Hengartner and Marnie Wedlake both posted critical questions in response to a benzodiazepine news story:
In response to …
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1. Cancer is not rare. Technically, childhood cancer is rare compared to adult cancer, but it’s not as rare as you think. Outside of my work, I can think of 3 people who I know personally that had a childhood cancer. A teammate on my high school basketball team, my sister-in-law, and a high school debate teammate. My guess is that you also know someone from church, a coworker’s …
On a curiously warm morning last February, the minister arrived at my childhood home to guide my father to the other side. When he approached the bedside where all of us were gathered around with the Eagles Pandora radio humming in the background, my dad emerged from a semi-conscious state and sat up as best as he could. “Listen. I am not dying,” he declared. As an early-career researcher focused …
Trends or challenges have been a part of the fabric of social media for a long time. They have ranged from the benign ice bucket challenge (which raised millions for research on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) to the highly dangerous Tide pod challenge (which involved eating laundry detergent capsules). All of these internet phenomena involved videotaping an individual who performed a bizarre physical action for the …
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Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians.
A 49-year-old woman is evaluated during a follow-up visit. She is overweight and has hypertension and type 2 diabetes mellitus, both of which are well controlled. For several years, she has attempted to lose weight through various commercial diets; dietician-monitored, calorie-restricted diets; and physical activity. She has worked with a behavioral therapist, and …
Recently, a respected allergist reassured his audience: the mortality rate for food allergy is very low. The risk of dying in a car crash is much greater than the risk of dying from food allergy. The implication seemed to be that the anxiety around food allergy is misplaced. Though any loss of life is too great; statistically, food allergy deaths are rare. To the food allergy community, it just doesn’t …
If somebody asks you how many bones there are in a human body, please do not blurt out, “206.” The correct answer is nuanced. To respond accurately to the query, you have to address five questions. Who? What? When? Where? Why?
Consider first that humans vary from one another in facial features, hair color, height, and shoe size. Unknown to nearly everybody except …
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Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians.
A 25-year-old man is evaluated for dark-colored urine for 2 days, swelling of the face and hands for 1 day, and severe headaches this morning. He reports having an upper respiratory tract infection 1 week ago with fever, sore throat, and swollen glands, but had otherwise felt well. Medical history is otherwise unremarkable, …
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