About a month ago, a 44-year-old insurance executive came to see me with complaints of headaches and muscle cramps. His pain was caused by the typical cluster headache located behind one eye, accompanied by one-sided tearing and nasal congestion, and often triggered by occasional wine or chocolate. The muscle cramps mainly affected the legs and seemed to worsen after exercise.
When I got the results of his lab work, I was …
At the recent AAMC meeting on how to integrate quality into teaching hospitals, the question that kept popping up from speaker after speaker was how to address the fact that doctors in teaching hospitals don’t get along.
Unfortunately, all the specialty bashing that takes place prevents the adoption of a team based culture necessary to advance quality and safety. As one speaker highlighted, how can we really start to address this …
A couple of months before my son was born 2 1/2 years ago, we were notified that my husband, an active duty member of the Navy, was getting deployed to Iraq.
His date of departure was exactly one week after my due date. To any wife or family member of a service member, this would be difficult news — a loved one going into a war zone. But, to me, 8-months …
by Felasfa Wodajo, MD
Recently, we had the chance to check in with Dr. Henry Feldman. He had posted a detailed summary of his experiences using the iPad as his main interface while rotating on service for a week as a hospitalist at Beth Israel Deaconess hospital (BIDMC) in Boston. Dr. Feldman is also Chief Information Architect for the Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians.
The summary of the …
I was in a room full of Family Doctors – who call themselves everything but Family Docs: Family Physicians (FPs) Primary Care Physicians (PCPs) General Practitioners (GPs). It was the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM) Spring Conference, at a session entitled: “Language Matters: Women-centered talk during pelvic exams.”
Two men amongst 20 women, all interested in learning more about being Politically Correct (PC) whilst conducting a pelvic exam. Session leaders Drs …
I’ve been interested in the role of testosterone in physical performance, depression and aging for many years. While at the University of Iowa, I was involved in research to detect testosterone doping, the psychological effects of testosterone and the potential for testosterone to alleviate depression in older men.
One of the difficult questions facing clinicians is when is testosterone too low in older men.
One problem with answering this question is the …
It is insulting to think that doctors who are ostensibly smart enough to save one’s life are in fact so stupid, or merely gullible enough, to be swept away by what is in actuality only a very weak potion of sales-presentation intermixed with and embedded within generally informative and pharmaceutical-balanced subject-focused medical lectures.
Such lectures occur usually at a private function room at a restaurant or, in conjunction with a served …
by Marianna Rakovitsky, RPh
Oh, Summer! The weather is warm, the sun is shining and it is the time when we try to get outside as much as possible. Summer is my favorite time of the year. I love the beach, days that are filled with light and sunshine, trips to the orchards and hanging out in the backyard. The sunshine that makes the summer such a …
Gordon Gekko is wrong. Greed is not good. Not when it comes to health care providers.
The socioeconomic study of what motivates people is a fascinating field of study, not the least of which is because of how counter-intuitive it is. For example, it seems normal to assume that the more someone is rewarded for their efforts, the more effort they will put forth toward those rewards.
These rewards (increasing salary, bonuses, …
Pathologists and radiologists don’t have the luxury of spending time with actual patients so they have to render professional judgments and determinations based on indirect data (radiographs, a mashed up slice of breast tissue, etc.).
I don’t envy them; the utter detachment from patient care would make me miserable. But they do have a tough job. They get one shot at getting it right. There’s no patient follow up. They never …
Celebrities are powerful role models and are important to consumers concerned with their health because of the perception that famous people have access to the best health practices and medical care. The public looks to celebrities for hope and inspiration as they struggle with their own health issues and fight disease. However the health practices that celebrities promote are often questionable and misleading.
One currently popular folk remedy, kombucha tea, is …
by Edison Wong, MD
With the recent proposal to repeal the so-called Massachusetts “gift ban” (more appropriately referred to as the “interaction ban”), I asked myself who stands to gain the most from such bans?
Is it the consumers or patients? Is it the physicians or their practices? Is it the federal or state governments? Nope. Sadly, it is the insurers who gain the most, at the expense of patients.
The …
As trained caring professionals, often we think of self-care as “selfish” or something that we do after we’ve taken care of our other “duties”, “responsibilities” and “obligations”.
Just for a moment, I invite you to think of self-care in a different way. I invite you to consider that your knowledge and practice of self-care is essential to creating a healing relationship with your patients and creating a healing environment in your …
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My friend and colleague Katherine Chretien has a provocative op-ed in USA Today entitled, “A doctor’s request: Please don’t ‘friend’ me,” which asks the question whether doctors and patients should interact in social networking sites such as Facebook.
Social networking has huge potential in health care regarding the sharing of information and ideas, and could possibly even enhance communication between doctors and patients. However, as Dr. Chretien points out, many …
by Crystal Phend
Insufficient training among cardiologists in reading echocardiography results is wasting healthcare dollars and subjecting patients to unnecessary procedures, researchers said.
A review by sonographers of cardiologist-interpreted echocardiography findings at a Milwaukee medical center during a period of just over a year indicated major discrepancies in 29% of cases, leading to unnecessary further diagnostic testing or treatments for the wrong indication, according to a study presented here at the American …
by Cole Petrochko
The nation’s free clinics provide medical service to 1.8 million patients annually — more than half of those clinics operate without government funding and serve patients who are almost all uninsured — according to the first census of free clinics in 40 years.
Responses to a national mail survey by 764 free clinics in the U.S., reported in the June issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, revealed that …
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At a recent meeting I attended, a vigorous discussion broke out about what medical students, residents and attendings should wear, and more importantly what they should not wear.
Interestingly, patients have been asked to weigh in on this discussion. What to wear is also on the mind of many current second year medical students who may find themselves trying to take study breaks from USMLE 1 to go buy …
“I’m worried about my daughter’s posture. What can I do about it other than constantly nagging her to stand up straight?”
You’re probably talking about “kyphosis,” which is the rounded-shoulders, hunched forward kind of posture common in children and many adults. It’s often called “postural kyphosis” because it can be corrected if the child tries to stand straight up. Rarely, there’s a genuine spinal deformity, called Scheuermann’s Kyphosis or Scheuermann’s Disease, …
One in every 10 patients admitted to six Massachusetts community hospitals suffered serious and avoidable medication mistakes. This has created a new urgency for all hospitals in the state to install computerized physician order entry (CPOE).
At BIDMC, we implemented CPOE in 2001 and have not had a handwritten order in most areas, except for the 2 days of our network outage in 2002. Implementing CPOE is challenging and requires …
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I have given anesthesia for a lot of breast surgery. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the fog of pain and sorrow surrounding a double mastectomy.
All surgery is invasive in some way. Amputations, in particular, have a horror all their own; the idea that destroying someone – cutting off a body part, violating a coherent whole – should be necessary in order to save a life is almost …
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