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10 topics to discuss with your teen this summer

Conditions

June 27, 2012

In a pediatrician’s office, summertime is teen check-up time.

And, I love it.

Annual checkups are a time for me to catch up on the school year, brag about amazing extra-curricular accomplishments, and swoon over summer vacation plans. It is also a time for anticipatory guidance, private conversations, and facing the often sobering reality of teen life.

Throughout this past year, I have had the privilege of being involved in the lives of many …

Lesser known symptoms of seasonal allergies

Sakina Shikari Bajowala, MD

Conditions

June 26, 2012

My boys and I suffer from tree pollen allergies. More than birds chirping or flowers blooming, I have come to associate boogery sleeves and sneezing with the onset of spring. But these are the typical symptoms, which are easily recognizable as allergy-induced.

What I’d like to address in this post are some lesser known symptoms of seasonal allergies, which may also be rearing their ugly heads this spring. Red eyes and …

Why I chose to become a rural primary care doctor

Josh Bell, MD

Physician

June 25, 2012

My mom always told me she gave me the “doctor name” (apparently my name looks good with an MD after it), so in some ways I knew from an early age that this was going to be my profession. Though I toyed with the idea of being a bank teller in kindergarten, I realized after a while that this was really not the job I thought it was (no offense …

How families cope with the surgical waiting room

Kevin R. Campbell, MD

Physician

June 20, 2012

All of us hate waiting in lines. Our society breeds a “me-first” attitude. Often the lines in which we wait are slow to move and, we become irritable and angry. Somehow there is always someone who is able to outsmart the system and get served ahead of their place in the queue. In the typical queue at the grocery store, (or at the apple store genius bar) we become impatient because …

Why doctors should attend residency graduations

Wes Fisher, MD

Physician

June 19, 2012

June in the United States heralds the month when residencies end and new ones begin. While much will be written soon about the dangers of entering hospitals this time of year (this story never seems to tire with mainstream media), I would like to step back and reflect on why doctors should consider attending residency graduations. I had the pleasure of doing so recently.

Excitement. With all of the dreary news of …

Should medical students consider a combined psychiatry residency?

Julia Frank, MD

Education

June 19, 2012

“What about combined psychiatry-family medicine-neurology-internal medicine programs? Should I try to do a triple board program in psychiatry-child psychiatry and pediatrics?”

Every April, I field such questions from a slew of rising fourth year students who have become, to their surprise (and sometimes dismay), passionately interested in psychiatry. Psychiatry is a shortage specialty and psychiatric issues rank high among the challenges facing medical care systems here and around the world. For …

James Reason and the foundation of patient safety

Robert Wachter, MD

Physician

June 18, 2012

Professor James Reason is the intellectual father of the patient safety field. I remember reading his book Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents in 1999 and having the same feeling that I had when I first donned eyeglasses: I saw my world anew, in sharper focus.

Reason’s “Swiss cheese” model, in particular – which holds that most errors in complex organizations are caused not so much by …

Marcus Welby, MD is still relevant today

Hans Duvefelt, MD

Physician

June 17, 2012

The year is 2012. A 58-year-old veteran Family Physician who has just finished a day with more human heartaches than clinical triumphs settles down among the pillows with his wife in front of his MacBook to watch a movie, delivered wirelessly over the Internet:

“The year is 1969. A 62-year-old veteran general practitioner who has just seen his health threaten to fail him, speaks passionately to a group of doctors about …

Does it matter if your doctor is board certified or board eligible?

Christopher Johnson, MD

Physician

June 16, 2012

Does your doctor have something on the wall that starts with “American Board of … “?

The terms “board certified” and “board eligible” are confusing to people not in the medical profession. It doesn’t help that more than a few doctors blur the distinctions to their own benefit. This post gives you a brief rundown of the distinctions at stake.

The first thing to understand is that anybody who has graduated from …

Clinician researchers meet the physician scientists

Vinay Prasad, MD

Physician

June 15, 2012

Recently our department of medicine grand rounds was on the subject of asthma. It began with a clinical vignette about a child with asthma, lasting three minutes, and, was followed by 47 more of intracellular cascades. The talk was like many others this year, and the speaker, who was introduced as a physician scientist, lived up to the part.

As someone who works in an academic hospital, I know many physician-scientists. …

Is there a harm to not seeing drug reps?

Matthew Mintz, MD

Meds

June 10, 2012

Now more than ever, the growing consensus among many is that doctors should avoid seeing pharmaceutical sales representatives, otherwise known as drug reps. A position statement from the AAMC, the head organization of all US medical schools and residency programs, recommends that all academic health centers avoid having drug reps on their campuses, hospital and clinics. Many medical institutions including the VA and Kaiser have also enacted similar policies banning …

What can be done for children with migraine headaches?

Mark W. Green, MD

Conditions

June 9, 2012

Recently, as I finished up a visit with one of my patients who has migraine, she asked me the following: “My 10 year old daughter gets headaches. Is it possible that she has migraines too? I had headaches as a child and was always told it was nothing to worry about, but now I have headaches several times a month. Is there anything I can do to prevent this from …

What does an ACO mean in small town America?

Robert Provenzano, MD

Policy

June 9, 2012

At the end of long days I often stand gazing out my window at the beautiful, timeless Rocky Mountains in Colorado Springs and am taken by their sense of permanence. I recently returned from Nampa, Idaho, where I presented hospital Grand Rounds on Accountable Care Organizations.

The parallels between the timeless mountains and the physicians I met in Nampa struck me. Strange, you say? Maybe, but I am accustomed to the …

My pediatrician inspired me to become a physician

Reflex Hammer

Education

June 7, 2012

I recently learned the sorry news that my childhood pediatrician has died. Not only was he my pediatrician, but he was also my father’s pediatrician. Our family became rather close to him over the years.

He came from a different generation of doctors, one that made house calls, that served in wars abroad, and that learned how to diagnose patients in the days before MRIs and CT scans. Even though I …

Hide your health insurance status and pay cash instead

Dike Drummond, MD

Physician

June 6, 2012

It always has broken my heart to see a person bankrupted by the costs of their healthcare. I remember my outrage when I first learned the only people who pay full price for their medical procedures are the ones paying cash. Insurance companies use their market muscle and patient volumes to negotiate discounts for their patients that have always been unavailable to the uninsured, individual healthcare consumer.

If you have been …

Is the daily blood draw in the hospital truly necessary?

Ioana Baiu, MD

Conditions

June 5, 2012

One of the most memorable discussions regarding the cost of care was at 4:45AM during surgical morning rounds.

As usual, the interns would present the overnight events of their patients to the chief resident and a plan for the day would be agreed upon. These morning rounds were particularly intense: in addition to the 30 patients that an intern had to manage solo over night, the brutal hours that the surgical …

The problem of conflicting professional medical guidelines

Juliet K. Mavromatis, MD

Physician

June 5, 2012

Guidelines for care increasingly help guide medical decision-making. If you’ve followed top health news over the past several years you’ve read conflicting statements about the utility of various medical procedures and tests. As a general internist I’ve devoured these reports with particular interest trying to wade through bias to formulate views that I believe will be of most benefit to my patients.

Recently I put together a talk about recommendations for …

Using Advair to treat postinfectious cough

Matthew Mintz, MD

Meds

June 3, 2012

I am not a huge baseball fan to begin with, and when I am, I root for the Nationals. Thus, I pay little attention to the New York Yankees, and was not aware that Yankee player Mark Teixeira had been suffering from a cough for the past month until it the story from the New York Times came through one of my Twitter feeds. According to the story: “Mark Teixeira had …

How doctors handle fear will determine their ability to give care

James C. Salwitz, MD

Physician

June 1, 2012

There was a night when I was in training that all the decisions, disasters and chaos, which are the practice of medicine, caught up to me. In those dark hours, I felt practically despondent. What I had seen left me in tears and overwhelmed by the tasks in front of me.

At that moment a wise attending physician took a moment to sit with me. Rather than tell me how wonderful …