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Explaining why belief in pseudoscience is often evidence resistant

Conditions

May 4, 2011

What links belief in tarot cards, UFOs and vaccine rejectionism? Yes, they are all forms of superstitious or magical thinking, but are there characteristics that predict who will believe in such nonsense? That’s one of the questions that psychologists Marjaana Lindeman and Kia Aarnio seek to answer in their paper, Superstitious, magical, and paranormal beliefs: An integrative model.

Lindeman and Aarnio postulate that believers in superstition, paranormal phenomena and pseudoscience make …

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Dealing with a negative online review on a physician rating site

KevinMD

May 3, 2011

Whenever I speak about social media to doctors across the country, I often get asked, “How do I deal with a negative online review?”

Here’s one way not to handle it: sue the patient writing the review.

There’s a well publicized case in Minnesota, where a resident posted a screenshot of …

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Should nurses be fired for fatal medication errors?

KevinMD

May 2, 2011

Kimberly Hiatt was a pediatric critical care nurse who accidentally gave an infant a fatal overdose of calcium chloride last year.

By accounts, it was a calculation error. A human mistake.

After the incident, the hospital fired her.

This past April, she took her own life.

Although it cannot be concluded that the tragedy was directly responsible for her suicide, the incident clearly …

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Why do people decide to become doctors anyway?

Michelle Au, MD, MPH

Physician

May 1, 2011

shutterstock_103351685
An excerpt from This Won’t Hurt A Bit (and other white lies): My Education in Medicine and Motherhood. Copyright © 2011 by Michelle Au. Published by Grand Central Publishing.

Let’s look at this first purely from the perspective of personal investment and expectation. To practice medicine, …

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The war on pubic hair must end

Emily Gibson, MD

Conditions

April 29, 2011

I must have missed the declaration of war on pubic hair.

It must have happened sometime in the last decade because the amount of time, energy, money and emotion both genders spend on abolishing every hair from their genitals is astronomical. The genital hair removal industry, including medical professionals who advertise their specialty services to those seeking the “clean and bare” look, …

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How doctors can use Facebook responsibly

KevinMD

April 28, 2011

I was quoted recently in the New York Times’ Well blog, in a Danielle Ofri piece on Facebook and doctors.

There’s no question that Facebook has been a minefield of sorts for the medical professions, with infractions ranging from unprofessional conduct by medical students to patient privacy violations by attending physicians.

One solution would be for doctors to simply avoid …

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The exhaustion of emergency physicians, and its toll on patients and family

Jessica Freedman, MD

Physician

April 26, 2011

When I advise students about how to choose a specialty, I suggest that they seek out advice from physicians who are at least 10 years out of residency and leading the type of life they hope to have in the future.

It is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to anticipate in your late 20s or early 30s what practicing a certain specialty will be like when you are 40, 50, or 60.

Find …

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Using Google Translate in medicine

Kevin

Tech

April 21, 2011

by Graham Walker, MD

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Babel Fish was a fish you stuck in your ear that allowed you to understand any language spoken to you. We’re not far off.

Google recently released a new version of their (free!) Google Translate app for Android phones, featuring conversation mode, which allows you to have a back and forth …

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Doctor reprimanded after patient privacy breached on Facebook, my take

KevinMD

April 20, 2011

Patient privacy and social media use in health care often go together when reported in mainstream media.

When physician blogs were a relatively new phenomenon several years ago, the majority of the media coverage focused on edge cases, where doctors inadvertently revealed patient information.

Only a minority of the headlines focused on the positive aspects, such as how …

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Does being a disadvantaged applicant affect my medical school application?

Jennifer Adaeze Anyaegbunam

Education

April 19, 2011

When applying to medical school, the American Medical College Application Service (AMCAS) asks aspiring physicians if they would like to be considered “disadvantaged” applicants or not.

Many premedical students find themselves troubled by this question and wonder, what does it mean to be disadvantaged? How does being a disadvantaged applicant affect my medical school application? According to the information American Association of …

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Natural forces within us are the true healers of disease

Hans Duvefelt, MD

Physician

April 14, 2011

In my forays into the history of medicine I came across these six little words by Hippocrates.

They seem strangely modern, almost like something you might find on a Hallmark-card for today’s medical school graduates. I don’t know how old the translation is and I couldn’t understand the original text if I tried – but these simple words really touched me when I …

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How an ACO will affect physicians and Medicare patients

Benjamin Geisler, MD, MPH

Policy

April 14, 2011

by Benjamin P. Geisler, MD, MPH

Everybody is talking about Accountable Care Organizations or ACOs these days.

The reason being that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services or CMS has released the rules for shared savings between ACOs and CMS.

The complete proposed rule is 429 pages long and they’re seeking comments on it now until early June.

What is an ACO?

ACOs will take care of …

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Physicians referring patients to a diagnostic facility they own

Policy

April 10, 2011

Federal law generally prohibits physicians from referring their own patients to a diagnostic facility in which they have an ownership issue – a practice called “self-referral” – unless the facility is located in their own practice.

This exemption exists to allow patients with access to a laboratory test, x-ray, or other imaging test at the same time and place as when patients are seeing their physician for an office visit. Less …

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Think about medical school tuition debt before becoming a doctor

Skeptical Scalpel, MD

Education

April 7, 2011

Recently, I received a call from the son of some old friends. This 30-year-old man has been an elementary schoolteacher for the past few years and recently decided that he would like to go to medical school and eventually become a surgeon. He wanted to know what I thought of the idea.

Suppressing the urge to tell him not to even consider …

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How the reformulation of Oxycontin has affected patients

Christian Sinclair, MD

Meds

April 7, 2011

Having a healthy level of respect for opioids is critical for any physician. For those of us who prescribe or recommend this class of medicines on a daily basis, this statement rings all the more true.Recent events and research reinforce this reality.

“Oxycontin, Other Opioid Painkillers Tied to Higher Health Risks” was the title of a recent BusinessWeek article …

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A confident, independent, empowered woman is a force to be reckoned with

Melanie Lane, MD

Physician

April 5, 2011

I am infinitely blessed by The Girl Effect. As I look back through the generations of my family, I see it rolling toward me, through me like a wave.

I am sure it started even before my grandmother stole her parents’ car with intent to drive by herself from Austin to Chicago to see the World’s Fair in 1924; I just don’t have much history to work with prior to that. …

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MKSAP: 28 year old woman with easy bruising and bleeding gums

mksap

Conditions

April 2, 2011

Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians.

A 28-year-old woman has a 3-month history of easy bruising and bleeding gums. She feels otherwise well. Medical and family histories are unremarkable, and she takes no medications.

On physical examination, temperature is normal, blood pressure is 110/70 mm Hg, pulse rate is 64/min, and respiration rate …

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Diagnostic errors and their role in patient safety

Charles A. Pilcher, MD

Physician

March 31, 2011

American Medical News published an informative essay by Kevin B. O’Reilly on December 13, 2010, about errors in diagnosis and why doctors make them.

According to Gordon Schiff, MD, associate director of the Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, “The problem of diagnostic errors has gotten short shrift in the broader patient safety movement.” The article focused on …

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Why medical education needs to be more affordable

Education

March 29, 2011

I was talking to a young man who is starting medical school this fall. His tuition at one of South Carolina’s newer schools will be $40,000 per year. That’s admittedly on the high end. On the low end, it runs a paltry $33,000 per year.

And this is all after college, of course. He and others like him are taking out loans to the tune of $240,000 to pay for their …

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Reductionism and daily medical practice

George Lundberg, MD

Physician

March 28, 2011

The results of the application of reductionism in modern biomedical research and practice has been nothing short of miraculous, but while wondrous for some things, reductionism alone is incomplete.

The basic premise of reductionism is that by breaking down (or “reducing”) complex biological or medical phenomena into their many parts, one is much more likely to understand a single cause and devise a cure.

Historically, the invention of the microscope, the defining …

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