It’s no secret that America is suffering from a huge crisis in healthcare. As we watch the sun rise on Obamacare, doctors, patients, insurance executives, hospitals, small businesses and legislators alike stand agape. No one seems to have found a simple, logical solution.
The solution is in fact very simple. It’s so ridiculously simple, it might make one laugh. And, believe it or not, it’s also amazingly cheap.
But because of its …
In 2008, the state legislature of Washington passed what was called the Death with Dignity Act, a law that legalized physician assisted suicide. Under the law, terminally ill patients (predicted to have less than six months to live) can request prescriptions for lethal medications from their physicians, under a series of safeguards: multiple requests for example, determination of competency, and the like. Then, if the patients so choose, they can ingest …
We gastroenterologists are regularly summoned to bring light into dark places. We are the enlightened ones who illuminate anatomical shadows. Sure, we have tunnel vision, but we like to believe that we can think broadly and creatively as well.
We are the scope doctors.
We are commonly consulted by primary care physicians and hospitalists to perform colonoscopies, upper endoscopies (EGDs) of the esophagus and stomach and other gastrointestinal delights. We deliver a …
In 2007, I published a story in my local paper in which I confessed to having made a medical error years earlier. I’d mistakenly prescribed an antibiotic for a patient whose chart indicated an allergy to the drug.
Thankfully, the story had a happy ending. My patient recovered and took no legal action after I explained to her what had happened. I ended my article vowing to take greater care to prevent errors …
This year my wife and I decided to compile a list of all of the holidays we’ve had since we had kids. Its a nice list and we’re lucky to have traveled as well as we have.
I always get excited about going. There’s the anticipation of downtime away from work (and other peoples’ problems), time for relaxation, sleeping, eating, reading, and some quality time with my family. Life is just …
A guest column by the American Society of Anesthesiologists.
Not so many years ago, surgeons wouldn’t operate on patients they considered too old to tolerate the stress of anesthesia and surgery. Today, however, patients of every age — from Baby Boomers to the Greatest Generation — undergo anesthesia safely for surgery and diagnostic procedures.
Realistically, even if you believe …
I used to think medicine would get easier over time. It makes sense, right? You see patterns, you learn how treatments work, and you just get to know stuff. Experience should make it easier to diagnose and treat.
That’s not been the case for me. In fact, it’s closer to the opposite. In the exam room, as I look up to the patient from my stool, and before I stand at …
1. When your doctor looks into your eyes with a flashlight, shut your eyes tightly so he can’t see your pupils. Later, when your doctors asks you to shut your eyes tightly to test your eyelid strength, look at him like he’s speaking in tongues and keep your eyes open. If he whips out his flashlight to look at your pupils …
Online dating is a bad idea for teens — especially young teens.
That’s why it wasn’t particularly responsible of Seventeen Magazine to publish a blog in which “dating blogger” Isabelle Furth floated the idea of using sites like Match.com to find dates. To be fair, she had concerns about the idea, and she’s in college, so theoretically old enough to make these decisions. But college kids don’t read Seventeen. Middle school …
Not long from now, the last cancer will be defeated, and even today most with the dread disease survive. However, many still fall. This leaves us with one of the toughest questions of life. How long do you continue to fight, when death is certain? When does striving become vain hope which drains quality and creates only suffering? What makes struggle worth the …
Folks must think than all doctors know all things medical. I know this is true by the questions that I have been asked over the years. While my expertise spans hemorrhoids to heartburn, I am routinely queried on medical issues well beyond the specialty of gastroenterology. When I can’t answer questions about a new medicine for hypertension or if an MRI of …
A while back I was working in pediatric urgent care and had occasion to do something I have done many times since starting out in medicine. I called a consult. The reason, like many consults, was an abnormality on a study that required a specialist’s opinion. I paged the resident on call for this particular specialty.
When they called back I was treated, right from the get-go, to some serious attitude. This was a legitimate …
With immigration reform under hot debate, it’s important to remember that all of us except the Native Americans are foreigners. It’s what has made our culture so diverse. People from foreign countries ideally bring the best of their cultures to the US and enrich us all with the diversity of life. This advantage lessens considerably when those visitors want to enter fields in which understanding of endemic American culture is …
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I’ve been traveling around the United States working as a locum tenens (in Latin, “place holder” – a more elegant name than “temp”) physician. We’ve all heard of traveling nurses, but more and more physicians are also “living la vida locums,” as it were. There are actually over 100 agencies who find/provide temporary physician coverage for hospitals who need to fill gaps in their full timers’ schedules. You can find out more about …
High fructose corn syrup, that sweet over-produced commodity of agribusinesses everywhere, has been linked in two miserable ways to bees and honey. The first discovery was made almost two years ago, and the second only 2 months ago. First, most of the “honey” available for purchase in supermarkets is not really honey, but instead an ultra-filtered impostor often produced in China, and …
In my over three decades of family practice, I have come to the conclusion that we, as doctors, should provide non-medical people with as much medical information as we can. Not as much as we think they should have, or information just related to the problem at hand, but as much as we can provide. Period.
I started practicing when many still debated whether we should tell a patient if he …
I just left the most unusual conference I have ever attended. First, it was small: 25 invited participants. Second, it was all women. Third, it was all women who have done amazing things …make that “trailblazing things.” They were journalists at major news outlets, retired military officers from the highest ranks, senior leaders (in some cases, the most senior leader) at major federal and state health care agencies, Fortune 500 companies, large …
Monday afternoons are always the same. I pick up the kids from their grandparents. We drive home with their backpacks and a carton of home made food. We park in the garage, and carry all the contents of the car into the house. As the kids unload, I push the recycle container to the front for street pickup the next day.
Occasionally, I stop and socialize. Yesterday, I waited at the edge …
It occurs to me there are several keys to being an excellent physician. One must love science, enjoy hard work, have the courage to make tough decisions, carry a modicum of intelligence and suffer angst at receiving 94% on an organic chemistry test. In addition, the very best physicians, those we admire and to whom we flock, have a secret weapon. They do not care.
I do not mean that they …
In recent months, AAFP President Reid Blackwelder has been editorializing and debating what they see as the encroachment of nurse practitioners (NPs) and other “mid-level providers” (physicians are, presumably, “upper-level”) on the practice territory of family physicians (FPs). Dr. Blackwelder has repeatedly said that NP and physician roles are “not interchangeable.” The AAFP’s position on this issue seems to be resistance to the increasingly common decisions by state legislatures to …
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