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Kombucha tea can be dangerous to your health

Michele R. Berman, MD

Potpourri

July 29, 2010

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 …

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The Massachusetts gift ban benefits health insurance companies

Kevin

Meds

July 23, 2010

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 …

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5 principles of self-care for health professionals

Physician

July 20, 2010

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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Echocardiogram reading by cardiologists needs to improve

Kevin

Conditions

July 16, 2010

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 …

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Free clinics need more government funding

Kevin

Policy

July 14, 2010

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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What residents and medical students should wear in the hospital

Vineet Arora, MD and Shalini Reddy, MD

Education

July 13, 2010

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 …

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How to treat slouching in children

Roy Benaroch, MD

Conditions

July 9, 2010

“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, …

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How to implement CPOE successfully at your hospital

John Halamka, MD

Tech

July 9, 2010

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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The grief men face when their wives undergo mastectomies

Anesthesioboist T., MD

Conditions

July 8, 2010

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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Physical features of autism spectrum disorder (ASD)

William R. Yates, MD

Conditions

July 6, 2010

Social and language issues dominate most of the discussion about the features of autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

A neglected area of study are the physical feature characteristics that have been known to be associated with ASD. Unlike some of the diagnostic physical changes in disorders such as Down Syndrome, physical features found in ASD are often subtle and missed by most clinicians.

Ozgen and colleagues from the Netherlands, UCLA and the UK …

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Kidney stone pain, as experienced by a man and a woman

StorytellERdoc, MD

Conditions

July 5, 2010

shutterstock_128891225

As a typical guy, there are several painful illnesses that can hit our brotherhood in an instant. No warning was given. No “Get out of jail free” pass, either. Just cruising along, having another fine, healthy day, and bam! — suddenly, you are lying on the floor in severe distress.

The most feared? A testicular torsion. It can happen spontaneously. It can …

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Ranking prestige of medical diseases

Jan Henderson, PhD

Conditions

July 4, 2010

Among medical specialties, some are more prestigious than others. You can generally tell which ones are more prestigious by how well they pay. Surgery and cardiology, for example, rank at the top of the prestige scale. Psychiatry and dermatology are near the bottom.

One can also ask if some diseases are considered more prestigious than others, in the opinion of doctors.

A Norwegian doctor, Dag Album, has been investigating the prestige …

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Why patients don’t value primary care doctors

Chris Rangel, MD

Physician

June 30, 2010

“Hey doc, all I need is this referral.”

I’ve been encountering more of this lately. A patient who has not been seen in the office for months to years (well beyond when they were supposed to come back for a follow up visit) walks in and requests a “referral” for a specialist visit but they can’t be bothered with actually being seen and evaluated in the office or to be compliant …

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Patient handoff video that every medical intern needs to see

Kevin

Education

June 23, 2010

Patient handoffs increase the risk of medical errors.

As I wrote recently in USA Today, as residency hours are restricted, more of these handoffs will take place. It’s imperative that this source of error be minimized.

Vineet Arora, associate director at the University of Chicago’s Internal Medicine residency, is one of the nation’s authorities on patient handoffs. She recently made a video for the incoming interns about the …

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8 insomnia tips to help you fall asleep without drugs

Jill of All Trades, MD

Conditions

June 19, 2010

Difficulty with sleep is one of the most common patient complaints presenting to the primary care office.

Chances are, you will suffer from difficulty with insomnia at some point in your lifetime. It can be distressing, and cause difficulty with functioning during your wake hours. The first thing you may want to do is to run to the doctor for a prescription for a medication to help you sleep.

However, you don’t …

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Heart catheterization worries that every cardiologist face

John Mandrola, MD

Physician

June 18, 2010

Malpractice and heart catheterization have been in the news recently.

A spicy concoction for sure. An epidemiological study published in an online subsidiary of Circulation addresses the role of three major medical issues facing cardiologists today: malpractice, heart catheterization, and medical costs.

It is hard to get more controversial.

Heart catheterization, the invasive assessment of the coronary artery lumen, has always been a hot-potato topic. The “percent-normal” was the buzz word when I …

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Tips for students who want to shadow doctors

Vineet Arora, MD

Education

June 17, 2010

On a recent Saturday, I rounded in the hospital. I met up with Zainab, the president of the minority premed association for the University of Chicago, who asked to shadow me. While she was doing research at the hospital, she had not ever rounded in the hospital before. It was Saturday so our team was mostly off so it was just me and my very capable resident who is about …

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Doctors make far less money than most people think

Kevin

Policy

June 15, 2010

A video excerpt from The Vanishing Oath, a film directed by Ryan Flesher, MD.

The average physician salary in the United States is $146,000 — which is undeniably a lot of money at face value.

But it’s a lot less when you factor in the overhead costs that doctors incur. And that’s not including the medical school debt which, on average, exceeds $150,000.

This clip shows how the take home pay of …

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