You are a new parent. Your infant is gassy, fussy, spitty, and does not sleep much. In other words your infant is a normal baby. You are stressed, and like any good parent, you want to fix what “ails” your infant. As you stroll down the baby aisle at the grocery store, you see labels that tout words like gentle, comfort, and restful. Formula manufacturers are brilliant. They know their …
Formula and the placebo effect on your baby
A common complaint about modern medicine is the depersonalization of the patient and the loss of compassion.
So let’s take a look at compassion.
Compassion is derived from the Latin “cum” (together with) and “patior” (suffer). From the perspective of clinicians, compassion is defined by two concurrent emotions: (1) a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by medical misfortune accompanied by (2) a strong desire to relieve that …
Depersonalization of the patient and the loss of compassion
by Rishi Manchanda, MD
As a primary care doctor for working families, I am interested in anything that can tangibly address my patients’ health problems. But how do I prescribe repeal?
The House effort to repeal and replace last year’s health care law is not just an untested placebo with major potential side effects, like increasing the number of Americans without health coverage. For those of us on …
How repeal and replace will affect patients
Antibodies are complex proteins created by immune cells that are targeted to very specific parts of other large and complex molecules called antigens.
Much smaller molecules like nicotine, called haptens, do not normally induce any significant immunologic response so researchers chemically bound several nicotine molecules to a large protein to form an adduct. This combined molecule does induce an immune response, i.e, causes immune cells to produce antibodies targeted to the …
Nicotine vaccine to treat tobacco abuse and nicotine addiction
This past summer I got a chance to visit Washington DC. While I was there, I saw a Norman Rockwell exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. As it turned out, the exhibition was the private collection of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. The exhibition highlighted Rockwell’s masterful storytelling.
I didn’t know much about Norman Rockwell before that day. I knew he was a famous American painter and I had seen …
What your medical office can learn from Norman Rockwell
If you listen to the discussions in health care circles about social media, you get the idea that social media is complicated, time consuming and a liability nightmare.
Nah.
It’s not that hard and can actually be quite simple if you consider your options carefully and logically.
Let’s look at a simple social media plan any health care professional can use.
If you’re even considering using social media to market or connect with current …
A simple social media plan any health care professional can use
There has been an irresistible urge for people — doctors, public health officers, politicians, journalists, the usual pundits — to compare adherence to HIV treatment in resource-rich vs. resource-limited setting.
I suspect this is because the whole issue got off to a famously bad start in 2001, when then-head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Andrew Natsios said in an interview with the Boston Globe that Africans,
don’t know what Western time …
Adherence to HIV treatment in Africa
Is there anything that we physicians can and should be doing to help with the huge problem of gun violence in America?
We all know it is nuts to sell guns and ammo to nuts, yet as a country we do it every day.
We all know that, in contrast to rifles and shotguns, the only moving targets for hand guns are people; that the Congress and president in this century legislated …
Guns and why doctors should partner with the National Rifle Association
An excerpt from White Coat, Black Hat.
by Carl Elliott
Many of us have a relatively simple, commonsense view of the way that drug development and marketing work.
People get diseases; scientists develop drugs to treat those diseases; and marketers sell the drugs by showing that the drugs work better than their competitors. Sometimes, however, this pattern works in reverse. Drug company scientists develop a drug …
Create a disease to market a new drug
One of my best friends in med school was an O.B. nurse. Though she has moved almost all the way across the country and I haven’t seen her since I was in school, we’re still in touch and expect to be seeing each other at last in a couple of months.
By some coincidence one of my best friends now is also an O.B. nurse. I’ll call her Ziva (yes, I …
Can a doctor and a nurse be friends in the OR?
Many of our most popular stories are about diets and weight management.
Did you know that some psychologists and psychiatrists would like to classify obesity as a brain disease? The reason for this is that there is mounting evidence that food, or certain types of food, can trigger the same addictive effects in the brain as drugs like heroin and cocaine. There is also substantial evidence that some people lose control over …
Should obesity be classified as a brain disease?
The New York Times has jumped all over a couple of recent scientific articles asserting that certified registered nurse anesthetists (CRNA’s) provide equivalent care as MD anesthesiologists. Already, it is legal in 15 states for CRNA’s to dispense anesthesia without the overarching supervision of a physician.
Furthermore, a study from the Lewin Group in California has demonstrated that CRNA-only models of anesthesia provision are far more cost effective that …
How MD anesthesiologists have become victims of their own excellence
An excerpt from Tabloid Medicine: How the Internet is Being Used to Hijack Medical Science for Fear and Profit.
by Robert Goldberg, PhD
From the beginning, there were two problems with the connection between thimerosal and autism. The first problem with was that thimerosal, while about half mercury, contains ethyl mercury, for which there were no exposure guidelines. So the scientists used the ones for methyl mercury. However, the ethyl mercury …
Problems with the connection between thimerosal and autism
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You know that joke about the farmer whose cows are not producing enough milk? A university panel gathers under the leadership of a theoretical physicist. They analyze each aspect of the problem thoroughly and carefully, and after much deliberation produce a report, the first line of which is “First, assume a spherical cow in a vacuum.”
This joke has become short-hand for some of the reductionist thinking in theoretical physics, but …
Payment systems must take into account the art of medicine
Here’s your multiple choice question to set the stage: what percentage of all physicians do you think should be sued for malpractice?
Would you say one-in-ten doctors ought to be sued? Or one-third? How about every single one of them? Let’s make it one claim per doctor, nationwide. Does that sound reasonable? Keep in mind that even defending yourself against a suit will cost on average $40,649 per claim, ranging from …
Malpractice fails when it comes to medical errors
Childhood obesity is a problem. It is a function of the foods children eat both at home and at school. The people responsible for feeding children are parents not advertisers. Running the line that it is all to do with advertising allows adults to run a “Johnny told me to” line, which would not be accepted as an excuse from a child.
It is not about blaming parents. It is about …
Are parents to blame for childhood obesity?
ProPublica.org did some interesting frontrunning on the physician payment national database that will become operable sometime around 2013 as part of health care reform.
In the first of a series of stories that has been picked up by several mainstream media outlets, the New York-based investigative journalism non-profit culled all the physician payments that have been publicly posted by seven drug companies to date. It aggregated the dollars …
How effective will the physician payment national database be?
Menopause often brings more than physical changes. It also may bring uncertainty about cancer risks and cancer prevention.
Below, I’ve compiled some of the questions I frequently hear from patients about menopause and cancer. I hope these answers will help other women start informed conversations with their doctors about menopause-related concerns.
How does menopause affect a woman’s cancer risk?
Menopause does not cause cancer. But your risk of developing cancer increases …
Menopause and cancer: What women should know
Along with millions of Americans, I’ve tried to comprehend the tragic shootings in Tucson, reaching deep within myself to find compassion for a young man who has forever changed the world for himself and so many others through his actions.
For those of us who assess, diagnose and treat college students struggling with mental illness while trying to succeed in their academic pursuits, the events leading up to his impulsive killings …
Mental illness in the college student
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
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