by Eileen M.K. Bobek, MD
The year after I finished my emergency medicine residency, I had all four of my wisdom teeth pulled.
Afterwards, I looked as if I had taken several punches to my face. My jaw was swollen, my skin a cornucopia of muddied blues, purples, greens, yellows and reds. If people didn’t know better, I told my husband with a laugh, they might think that I’d …
Compassion and decency overwhelmed by fear
It is not until about eight weeks of age that an infant has a fully developed capacity for mutual gaze.
Then a baby looks directly into his mother’s eyes, while she, in turn, reflects back this loving gaze, cooing softly in response to her baby’s earliest communication. When a mother looks at a baby in a way that communicates with him, not with words but with feelings, “I understand you,” he …
Maternity leave and infant brain development
“Facebook is for the living, not the dying” – Regina Holliday
It finally happened. The day my Facebook feed included information about a friend’s illness. This is the photograph my friend Matt posted to his feed. Normally I don’t play that close attention to everything in there, but this caught my eye immediately.
When we talked on the phone, I understood that this …
Fight multiple sclerosis using YouTube and other social media tools
I mentioned having a migraine this past weekend, and was somewhat surprised by how many people commented and wrote to me, surprised that a doctor, let alone a neurlogist, would actually get migraines.
What’s up with that?
I know this may be hard to believe, but we get health problems too.
I see this odd view surprisingly often. People who somehow expect us to be beyond the health concerns of non-doctors.
We may be …
Your doctor isn’t superhuman and is allowed to call in sick
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 …
Is red wine really good for your heart and your brain?
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 …
How often to see your doctor when feeling well
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 …
Individual health beliefs play a role in medical decisions
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 …
Should obesity prevention be a personal matter?
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 …
Fetal ultrasound and our image oriented society
Your mother has been up all night.
She has Alzheimer’s Disease and now it has progressed to that inevitable stage of the dementing process where she is paranoid, agitated, and confused. She fidgets and paces and walks all day. She gets out of bed multiple times each night. She has gone out the door into the back yard and tried to escape to the street, wearing only her night clothes. Sometimes …
Caregiving and living with those who have mental illness
I recently completed a long stretch of night shifts in the emergency department. I have done a myriad of things – spent over twenty minutes trying to convince a patient to take a pill that she needed to treat her psychosis, sutured a facial laceration for a young gentleman who kept insisting that he wanted to leave AMA (against medical advice) and just place a …
How much we should try to help patients who do not want our help?
An excerpt from Saying Goodbye: How Families Can Find Renewal Through Loss. Published by arrangement with Berkley, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright(c)2011.
by Barbara Okun, PhD and Joseph Nowinski, PhD
One of the first tasks facing families upon receiving a diagnosis is to learn more about the illness or disorder that faces them. There are many ways to do this: by visiting Internet web sites; by …
Saying Goodbye: How families can find renewal through loss, an excerpt
Advocacy is an important and vital skill for any young adult, but young adults with cerebral palsy and other disabilities have a bit of a unique need for developing the skills. I would argue that the skills needed for self advocacy need to have the opportunity to develop in small ways when a child becomes a toddler.
For me, the roots of my advocacy were planted in the years prior to …
How patients can advocate for themselves
Doctor D has dodged some questions in his career, but he has also been on the receiving end of some non-answers and can attest to their usefulness on the patient’s side of things.
How can a doctor dodging a question help the patient?
Let me tell you a story:
Doctor D’s son Little D was born with a very rare genetic condition which required he see an expert at a big university. As …
Can a doctor dodging a question help the patient?
Winning the lottery — yes, I’ve heard the horror stories of how people’s lives have taken a turn for the worse after it’s happened. But, like many others, I still wonder what it would be like. I’d be willing to take my chances with the win!
But this post is not about money. Not at all. Actually it’s about gratitude.
It’s about the many ‘lotteries’ in life that have nothing to do …
Lotteries in life may have to do with suffering, disability and death
An excerpt from Little Patient Big Doctor: One Mother’s Journey.
by Haleh Rabizadeh Resnick
Dear Doctor,
I want to share with you my experiences with two of my children . . . . I share the hecticness our lives with you for a reason. We are all the same. We are all busy. We all face adversity. And while we want most to trust the opinions of professionals, …
Little Patient Big Doctor: One Mother’s Journey, an excerpt
One thing that many residents do not know is that there are more benefits to becoming a board certified physician than just that plaque on the wall. One of these benefits is that ability to pick up a few extra hours of work here and there doing consulting for the multitude of companies that would like the opinion or expertise of a physician.
In some cases this consulting can be about …
Why your health insurance medical appeal was rejected
I interviewed Tania Schlatter, one of the best designers I know and a guest-lecturer for Web Strategies for Health Communication, about color, imagery, and other aspects of health website design.
Lisa: How is the design of health websites different than for other types of sites?
Tania: The design of any site goes back to the goals of an organization and what people coming to a site need. Healthcare consumers can …
Secrets of good health website design
There are nearly 1.5 million Americans who suffer each year from preventable mistakes. A report by the Institute of Medicine estimates that as many as 98,000 people die in U.S. hospitals each year as the result of medical errors.
Most of these errors are related to drug mistakes. That’s the bad news. The good news is that your doctors and hospitals are trying to reduce these errors by using by using …
How you can reduce preventable mistakes in your medical care
I have a patient who I will call Antonia.
Antonia is in her early 70’s. She came to the United States from Guatemala many years ago, but never learned to speak much English. This doesn’t cause her much of a problem; her community is small and tightly-knit, so she doesn’t have much need to speak English in her home or her neighborhood. And she has a large family—children and grandchildren and …
Start thinking about health literacy in a broader framework
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