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Don’t miss this adverse drug reaction when tapering benzodiazepines

Meds

November 27, 2018

“Alice Woods” is dying of metastatic breast cancer, but she cares little for awareness efforts like pink ribbons and catchy hashtags like #stage4needsmore. You see, Alice has akathisia due to an adverse effect from discontinuing Klonopin — a condition that has caused her far more suffering than her terminal cancer. It has also prevented her from receiving adequate cancer treatment and is, therefore, ending her …

How sickle cell anemia influences a medical school journey

Bianca Bowden

Education

November 25, 2018

“Where there is no struggle, there is no compassion.”
-Frederick Douglass

Growing up with sickle cell anemia exposed me to the field of medicine. As I go through the pain and complications, it humbles me to the point that motivates me to work harder to be the doctor I want for myself. I want to be a physician-scientist that conducts clinical research targeted toward patients like me. I believe that as a …

Medicine: noble profession or big business?

David A. Guss, MD

Policy

November 24, 2018

In 1976 I graduated from medical school and proudly joined the medical profession. Thirty-seven years later, I retired as an employee of the biggest business in the country. In 2016 the medical industry was responsible for 3.3 trillion dollars of expenditure, comprising 18 percent of the United States GDP. For perspective, there are only four countries with a GDP more than the amount spent on health care in the United …

Make peace with stress in the ER

Health eCareers

Physician

November 24, 2018

This article is sponsored by Careers by KevinMD.com.

Working in the emergency department or emergency room is not for health care practitioners who want to just chill. Although television’s portrayal of the ER on dramas like “ER” or “Chicago Med” is admittedly high on drama, life and work in the ER really are high pressure.

In 2016, the Read more…

Make peace with stress in the ER

The evolution of residents’ hours

Kevin Tolliver, MD, MBA

Physician

November 23, 2018

It was the 24th hour of my call shift, and I was running on fumes. Despite my weariness, I could see the first rays of morning sunlight coming through the window in my patient’s room. It was then I knew I could make it to hour 30 (quitting time). It was grueling to keep going, but hitting the 30-hour mark only required me to keep my head down and do …

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The evolution of residents’ hours

Is your smartphone leading to burnout?

Cory Fawcett, MD

Tech

November 22, 2018

Burnout and dealing with its symptoms has become a hot topic in the last decade. It’s a problem that has multiple contributing factors. Some of those factors are thrust upon us and are beyond our control, such as government regulations. Other factors are self-imposed, and thus under our control, such as volunteering for extra call shifts. One self-imposed factor is a little thing we use to improve our lives, our …

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Is your smartphone leading to burnout?

Being financially secure is different than being financially independent

Dads Dollars Debts, MD

Finance

November 22, 2018

It is official. I have left my day job and have two months off before starting my next day job thanks to being financially secure. As many of you know, the Tubb’s Fire has led to many changes in my life over the past year. We had many decisions to make and now, 13 months out, are putting those plans into effect. The biggest of these decisions was to …

3 reasons why we should care about the health care experience

Suneel Dhand, MD

Physician

November 21, 2018

The health care experience is so much more than a buzzword to be talked about in administrative circles. Some physicians I encounter (a minority, but still enough) really scoff when they hear this term. Responses I’ve heard from doctors include: “Hospitals are not hotels!” or “If that means giving our patients as much Dilaudid as they want, then count me out!”

Aside from these sweeping statements being entirely silly, they are …

Why do we still use CD-ROMs for radiology images?

Paul Sax, MD

Physician

November 21, 2018

In the United States, any person who has tried getting their own (or their patient’s) radiology images from another hospital or practice will find the practice painful.

Here are several obvious reasons why the CD-ROM — briefly the darling of large data transfer — is a truly terrible way to share radiology images in 2018:

They require physical transfer. Remember the term “snail mail”? Do people still say that?

They are slow. When you bring a …

Is it still worth it to go to medical school?

Wall Street Physician, MD

Finance

November 21, 2018

Medicine has changed immensely over the past 40 years. Not only has the drugs, surgeries, and procedures changed, but the culture and economics of medicine have changed as well.

Radiologist and blogger Xrayvsn enlisted physician finance bloggers young and experienced to write posts on the common topic of generational perspectives of the past, present, and future of medicine:

Doctor of Finance MD: A Late-Career Perspective On Medicine
Xrayvsn: Medicine …
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Is it still worth it to go to medical school?

Lewy body dementia and a farewell to a physician’s father

Janice Boughton, MD

Conditions

November 20, 2018

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 …

The psychological impact of quitting medicine

Smart Money, MD

Finance

November 20, 2018

We talk about money on my website, and how to make sure that you have enough of it. In fact, that’s pretty much the entire strategy for the growing crowd of people in the world who are gunning to retire at an age that most neurosurgeons start their careers.

Those of us in the medical field who also have similar ambitions to work our finances intelligently are likely to have similar …

Everything you ever wanted to know about croup

Christopher Johnson, MD

Conditions

November 20, 2018

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, …

Suboxone for pain makes sense. Why don’t more doctors prescribe it?

Hans Duvefelt, MD

Meds

November 19, 2018

Many patients who end up in Suboxone treatment have chronic pain. They were originally prescribed other opiates and ended up addicted to them.

Skeptics argue that is just substituting one opiate for another. But that isn’t quite accurate. More on that in a bit.

In my seven years of prescribing Suboxone for opiate addiction, I have often observed how potent a pain reliever this medication is, even in fairly low doses. More …

Make sure your decision to leave medicine is not based on an emotional response

Lisa Herbert, MD

Physician

November 18, 2018

We know the statistics. More than 50 percent of physicians are experiencing burnout at the hands of EMRs, a nonexistent work-life balance and regulatory constraints to name a few. This is causing physicians to leave clinical medicine and find other work. Some are opting for nonclinical administrative roles, and others are leaving altogether for careers outside of medicine. This is adding to the shortage of physicians that we were already …

How technology removes the pain point from diabetes management

David Ahn, MD

Conditions

November 17, 2018

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 …

The stories of rural physicians

Health eCareers

Physician

November 17, 2018

This article is sponsored by Careers by KevinMD.com.

When George W. “Billy” Campbell, MD, walks down the street, he never knows who — or what — he’s going to encounter. Anything can happen when you’re the doctor at Foothills Family Medicine of Westminster, South Carolina, a small town with a population of only 2,500.

“I’ve had someone pull …

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The stories of rural physicians

The spirit of Santa Claus in medicine

Bernard Leo Remakus, MD

Physician

November 16, 2018

For longer than anyone could remember, he was the rural community’s pharmacist. A skilled compounder of prescriptions, he was conversant in chocolates, greeting cards, and how to obviate a trip to the doctor’s office by using an over-the-counter remedy.

A devoted family man, he was involved in many civic and church activities. Most have forgotten all the roles he once played in the community, but no one will ever forget that …

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The spirit of Santa Claus in medicine

The Osteopathic Oath vs. the Hippocratic Oath

Liz Hills, DO

Education

November 16, 2018

It was during the first few weeks of medical school that I realized that I was joining a secret society. Like many physicians, I was called to medicine at a young age. For me, it was Doctor Beverly Crusher from Star Trek: The Next Generation. I admired her — I wanted to be who she was and do what she did. (More or less, my dreams of space medicine transmuted …

Silence in health care is a crisis

Robert Van Boven, MD

Physician

November 16, 2018

I was moved when a family entrusted me to give a eulogy for their beloved. This great privilege highlighted a hallmark of a physician’s service to humanity: “to cure sometimes, alleviate often, but comfort always.” But I was horrified to learn that his death at the hospital may have been the result of a preventable error — one that was withheld from the family.

Sadly, that patient …

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Silence in health care is a crisis