by John Gever
Just about everyone catches colds, and just about everyone who gets one is able to go to work and cook their meals, and they nearly always recover within a few days whether or not they take anything for it. That’s normal.
So, is the advice to take aspirin “medicalizing normal behavior”? Are drug companies that market decongestants and fever reducers “medicalizing normal behavior”?
The answer …
Does the DSM-5 medicalize normal behavior?
I thought I was an oddball in college. I’ve only recently learned that I was avant garde.
Right before beginning college in 1975, I decided I wanted to be a doctor. Being the first-born son – with decent SATs – of an upwardly mobile Long Island Jewish family, I had relatively little choice in the matter. Notwithstanding this predestiny, I felt confident that medicine was a good fit for my interests …
Social science requirements for pre-medical students
by Walter van den Broek, MD, PhD
Often I ask my residents that if you can’t take care of yourself, how do you expect to take care of your patients?
Or in another way: the only difference between God and a doctor is that God knows he’s not a doctor. These sound like cliches but there is some truth in them. In short, doctors are just ordinary people …
How doctors can cope with stress
Since there are many antidepressants with varying dosage ranges, and many more degrees of variations between individual responses to particular antidepressants, psychiatrists have been unable to agree upon an operational definition of an “adequate trial” of an antidepressant.
However, it’s worth looking at some guidelines.
A 2003 study from the Journal of American Medical Association found that only 21.7% of Americans diagnosed with depression received “minimally adequate treatment” in the past 12 …
What is an adequate trial of an antidepressant?
How far will some women go to fit into high heels? The menu of services at Beverly Hills Aesthetic Foot Surgery in Studio City, Calif., provides a clue.
There’s the trademarked “Cinderella Procedure”—a preventive bunion correction that makes feet narrower. The clinic also offers the “Perfect 10! Aesthetic Toe Shortening” that invisibly trims toes that hang over the end of sandals or have to be crushed into tight shoes. There’s also …
Cosmetic foot surgery can have serious downsides
I am a medical doctor. I am also called an allopath, someone who practices “Western medicine.”
We allopaths like data, proof, science, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials. We want to know the “mechanism of action.” We want someone to prove that yoga or medication or some procedure actually helps your depression or blood pressure or back pain and that these treatments are safe before we prescribe them. We feel more confident about …
Most doctors don’t like prescribing pills
Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians.
A 62-year-old man is evaluated for an asymptomatic nodule on his shoulder that has been present for more than 1 year. Skin findings are shown.
Read more…
MKSAP: 62-year-old man is evaluated for an asymptomatic nodule
Some reflections on my first semester of medical school.
1. Medical school is hard. Yes, it’s true — medical school is as hard as people who have been through it make it out to be.
I was skeptical when I started mostly because I felt I had challenged myself while doing my undergrad degree and in graduate school. I had taken heavy loads …
Medical school is hard, and other medical student thoughts
Being a hospitalist, I often see patients sitting in the hospital for days at length for no reason other than poor planning.
Sometimes I feel that physicians who are involved in patient care are oblivious of each other. Everyone is in their own domain rather than working as a team. An increased length of stay in the hospital not only increases the cost of health care but also adds to the …
Hospitalist: Long hospital stays are often due to poor planning
by Dennis Grace
So, you have to go to the hospital. You’ve had an accident and the doctor wants to keep an eye on you for a few days. Maybe you need major surgery. Whatever the reason for the stay, a lot a people think you should have an advocate with you.
Why? In my life, I’ve had lots of hospital stays. Why is this suddenly a big …
An advocate for patients might save your life in the hospital
by Krupali Tejura, MD
I am treating a patient for head and neck cancer — which can be one of the most harrowing therapies.
To receive chemotherapy and radiation concurrently can be pretty debilitating. Swallowing foods can be next to impossible, and the taste changes and saliva changes are brutal. It’s one of the harshest areas to treat … and I warn the patients beforehand: …
Root beer bonds a chemotherapy patient with his oncologist
by Shawn Vuong
Recently, our class learned and practiced how to correctly ‘scrub’ for surgery. During this little lab activity, we were all gowned up and washing our hands when a couple of classmates asked if I was going to be a surgeon.
I said I didn’t really know yet, although I did find surgery pretty fascinating. With that, they told me that they thought I would make a good surgeon. due …
Does a stereotypical surgical personality exist?
An excerpt from Unhinged: The trouble with psychiatry- a doctor’s revelations about a profession in crisis. Copyright © 2010 Daniel Carlat. Excerpted with permission by Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
In 1993, the FDA approved Neurontin for the treatment of epilepsy. This should have been a cause for celebration at Warner-Lambert, the drug company that introduced it, but the celebration was muted. The FDA had …
How drug companies sell psychiatrists on their drugs
What follows are ten thoughts on checks and balances in health reform.
I am writing from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where I am attending a high school class reunion. My son Spencer, a nationally known poet and a candidate for the Episcopal priesthood, is with me. He is checking on my past, and I am trying to provide balance so he can understand his father’s legacy.
There …
Checks and balances in health reform
Eating right, exercising, avoiding the sun or using sunscreen, moderating alcohol consumption, abstaining from tobacco use, getting mammograms, Pap smears, colonoscopies—almost every measure we’re asked to take to safeguard our future health is difficult. It’s a strange paradox that we have to work in some way, to expend energy, and experience discomfort of some kind in order to gain benefit in life.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the most pleasurable things …
Positive reinforcement can motivate preventive behaviors
Medicine is a very old profession. Ancient and honorable. Sadly, for the vast majority of recorded history, honor was pretty much all it had. The Hippocratean ideals of “first do no harm” and putting the patient first and all held special importance when medicine truly had nothing to offer. Make no mistake: up until the last two centuries, the vast majority of what passed as …
Medicine is an old profession, but not the oldest profession
Recently, I had a discussion with a prominent academic family physician. I had last seen him 37 years ago when he was getting ready to graduate from medical school and I was a new medical student.
We had a wonderful discussion and agreed to disagree about merging primary care. Long time readers know that I dislike the term for the tasks that outpatient internists do. Most of the push for merger …
Why family medicine and internal medicine should not merge
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 …
Creatine causing muscle cramps and how supplements may be dangerous
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 …
Stop calling doctors fleas and teaching professionalism
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 …
Practicing medicine as a single parent requires finding balance
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