I was glad she never asked if I had done this before.
My first nasogastric tube was placed on an elderly woman with chronic liver disease. As her illness worsened, it gradually turned her skin yellow, her abdomen swollen, and her mind foggy. One day, we realized that she was at too high a choking risk to swallow her medications herself. She would need a plastic tube to do it for …
Fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) has emerged as an increasingly common treatment for patients with refractory Clostridium difficile infection (CDI). Unlike standard antibiotic approaches, which only exacerbate dysbiosis and may perpetuate CDI recurrence, FMT restores normal gut microbial community structure and function of the gastrointestinal tract. However, a number of challenges need to be overcome before this procedure is widely accepted in mainstream clinical practice.
Before I jump into highlighting …
Six years ago, just after arriving in Baltimore for a winter conference, I fell sick with fever and a bad sore throat.
After a night of feeling awful, I went looking for help. I found it at a Minute Clinic in a CVS near the hotel. I was seen right away by a friendly NP, who did a rapid strep test …
I saw this little news item from Shape Magazine about “vagina facials.”
First of all, the post means vulva. The vagina is inside and the vulva is the outside (where your underwear touches your skin). The vestibule is in between.
This what Shape Magazine had to say about it:
Created by Lisa Palmer, the facial came about after she “looked downstairs” and realized her vulva …
“Twilight! She has to have twilight,” insisted the adult daughter of my frail, 85-year-old patient. “She can’t have general anesthesia. She hasn’t been cleared for general anesthesia!”
We were in the preoperative area of my hospital, where my patient — brightly alert, with a colorful headband and bright red lipstick — was about to undergo surgery. Her skin had broken down on both legs due to poor circulation in her veins, …
One of my biggest pet peeves in life is tardiness. I hate it when other people are late. It’s as if they are not respecting my time. But you know what? I hate being late myself even more. In fact, I cringe at the thought. Conscientious, successful people are on time.
Always.
So you can imagine that nothing irks me more than being …
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
– Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride
Stick to Facts, sir! … In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir: nothing but Facts!
– Charles Dickens, Hard Times
“Information without context isn’t transparency” flashed across my Twitter feed. So now I am thinking about context, and communicating context, in medical care.
This quote, from Heather Pierce, JD, MPH, Director of Science Policy and Regulatory …
Sick of phone trees, endless refill requests, packed waiting rooms, out-of-control bills, and other medical misadventures?
Follow these seven simple steps to get your doctor to do what you want.
1. Get organized. Be clear about what you need from your appointment. Make a comprehensive list of all the issues you want to discuss — and your ideal outcomes for each. Patients who are …
Whenever I am asked this question, I can’t help but think of the punchline to a joke that was once supposed to be funny but would now be considered beyond the pale in all respects, so I won’t repeat it. The punch line is: “Just lucky, I guess.” That’s the short answer to why we gastroenterologists work in our field. Despite the distasteful aspect of human waste and the perverse …
The nationwide shortage of physicians is a very real crisis across all 50 states, causing a huge strain at all levels of health care. Hospitals and clinics are struggling to hire, current physicians are overworked, and ultimately patients have to wait longer.
There are a number of reasons why this has happened, but one thing’s for sure: With the aging population, the …
A guest column by the American Society of Anesthesiologists, exclusive to KevinMD.com.
Before undergoing surgery, you should carefully discuss your medications with your surgeon and physician anesthesiologist. You may fare better during the operation and the early recovery phase if you continue required medications, but you might need to avoid some medications that could interfere with your anesthesia. Three …
I recently went to Boston to see the Goya exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and was thrilled to see one of my favorite paintings by this artist: Self Portrait with Dr. Arrias. The painting was on loan from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts — a museum I never had the …
It’s been a long day, and you just want to decompress. My boyfriend tells me about his day. I get to hear about the insane amount of reading he has to do for graduate school, or about the occasional annoying customer he’s had to deal with at his part-time job as a bank teller. When it’s my turn to decompress, I usually gripe about a patient or two from the …
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There isn’t any such thing as an ordinary life.
– Lucy Maud Montgomery
Heroes are ordinary people who make themselves extraordinary.
– Gerard Way
My colleague, Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld, is currently on leave from his academic anesthesia practice as well as from his post as speaker of the house of delegates for the Massachusetts Medical Society to serve as Lt. Commander Jesse Ehrenfeld, combat anesthesiologist in Kandahar, …
Parents are appropriately expressing concern about the safety of Miralax®, a commonly used stool softener in kids, after a recent New York Times article exposed a potential association with long-term use of the drug and undesired behavioral side effects. As the article explains, the FDA has awarded a research grant to a team at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) to directly address these concerns.
Miralax® has been used …
I have to admit, I’ve been excited to see radiology slowly infiltrate into the mainstream of sports. Fifteen years ago, it was rare for the public to know when an athlete had an MRI. Now I hear people in the coffee shop saying:
“Man did you see Derrick Rose go down last night?”
“Yeah, we’ll just have to see what the MRI shows.”
In …
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My friend, Trent, is an auto mechanic. When he was growing up, he loved to work on old cars. He rebuilt his first one when he was fourteen — and drove it for 11 years. He loved finding problems and figuring out how to fix them. He never cared about getting rich; his goal was to make a decent living doing …
“So, I told the doctor at the nursing home that I loved my father more than anything. Dad was my friend and the most wonderful man I had ever known. I wanted everything for him. But, I said, Dad was sick, weak, confused, and he never wanted to live like that. The next morning he was dead. That was OK by me.”
I once participated in a panel discussion about hospice, …
Living in the trenches of a surgical internship can be a gut wrenching, lonely experience for many. The journey from medical student to resident to surgical attending is a notoriously steep trek, necessitating our long 6+ years of training. Surviving intern year remains as hard as ever despite the significantly greater resources and awareness that exists among residency programs today.
These burdens are felt by all specialties and have tragically led …
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“Katie, If you go into surgery, you’re going to miss patients.” It was three in the morning in the ED; the resident was feeling the strain of a 24-hour trauma call, and I was loving it. I had spent the past half hour with a lovely, older woman whose foot had gone through the floor of her vehicle in a crash. We chatted about where she had been traveling, and …
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