Climate change. Global warming. The greenhouse effect. Devastating wildfires, dangerous air quality. Catastrophic weather events and mass human migration. It all sounds like post-apocalyptic fiction except that it’s real. Inside our air-conditioned offices and homes, it can still be possible to be optimistic. Maybe it’s nothing out of the ordinary. Maybe it isn’t our fault and would have happened without human activity. Maybe we don’t know what will happen and …
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I delight in learning my patients’ stories and giving them exactly what they need when I take care of them in the hospital. Who they are and what is the best approach to their problem is the primary mystery to be solved, my Sherlock Holmes moment. This is why, if somebody asks me, I will tell them that doctoring is the best job in the world. The opportunity to connect …
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The New York Times is interested in fecal transplants. This is the euphemistic term for taking feces, poop, crap, sh*t, bowel contents from one person and putting it into another person. There are various procedures for doing this, from drying it and putting it into capsules to making it liquid and introducing it by enema, nasogastric tube or colonoscopy. It is a remarkably effective treatment for a wide range of …
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When I finished my training, I was taught that the vast majority of dementia was Alzheimer’s disease, with occasional cases of multi-infarct dementia as well as odd syndromes such as Kreutzfeld-Jacob disease and genetic, traumatic, toxic and tumor-related syndromes. Parkinson’s disease, we were taught, caused a tremor and freezing up of a person’s movements and only very rarely was associated with any kind of memory loss.
These teachings helped us modern …
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“If there is a physician on the plane, please press your call light!”
The vast majority of doctors who have flown on airplanes have heard this, and most of us are willing, if not entirely eager, to respond. What follows is usually a far from ideal encounter with inadequate information, too much noise, a cramped space to work in and little knowledge of what is expected or even possible.
My experiences (I …
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Medicaid — the program that provides funding for adults, seniors (along with Medicare), children and people who are blind or disabled who can’t pay for their own health care — is expensive. It is painfully expensive. The program, along with CHIP (the Children’s Health Insurance Program), marketplace subsidies and Medicare is responsible for 25 percent of the federal budget. Total Medicaid costs in 2016 were …
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I just read a Clinical Problem Solving case from the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). It was entitled “Stream of Consciousness“and it told the story of a 65-year-old man who was a patient at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital of Harvard Medical School, arguably one of the finest medical institutions in the world.
These cases are presented in single paragraphs to a clinical expert physician who then …
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Drug costs in the U.S. are higher than in in any other industrialized country in the world. Our cost for an insulin glargine (long-acting insulin) pen is $76.80 and in Canada, so very few miles away, it costs $19.60. The latter price is reasonable. The former price can make the difference between being able to afford a life-saving drug and dying. It is illegal, however, for a U.S. citizen to …
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I finally finished reading the many journals piled up on my dining room table, which have been shunted to other flat surfaces for projects or the visits of friends. I didn’t read them all well, but I touched them all and read what interested me.
The early October edition of the Annals of Internal Medicine particularly caught my eye. There were two major articles that looked at determinants of health in …
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Estrogen is a miracle drug for many women who experience the drenching sweats, sexual dysfunction and frustrating brain betrayals associated with entering menopause. It comes in expensive patches, less expensive pills or injections, as well as vaginal creams or rings. It has gone in and out of favor with the medical community for decades.
Estrogen is the main ingredient in most birth control pills and has been studied extensively in that …
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In about 1990 we got our first computer. I say “we” because my husband and I shared a desktop which I used infrequently. I mostly used it for word processing, and the Internet was very young. At the turn of the millennium, my children were using computers, and they were limited to 1 hour of computer time a day, which was on a shared desktop. By 2001, I was communicating …
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Physician burnout and physician suicide have been getting more attention in the last several years. Suicide among physicians is horribly tragic, and maybe moreso because of several factors. Suicide is the quintessentially most preventable fatal event. In order to prevent suicide, the person killing him or herself needs only not do it. To anyone who knows the victim/perpetrator, it seems that if only the right words had been spoken, the …
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I bought a pocket ultrasound in 2011, determined to learn how to perform and interpret ultrasound at the bedside and thus transform my internal medicine practice. I bought it new, and it cost over $8,000. That was a staggering amount of money to spend on something I knew very little about. In 2015 after having performed many thousand ultrasound exams with my little GE Vscan with the phased array transducer, …
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“Annie, Annie, are you OK?”
Many of us learned to resuscitate a person who has collapsed using Annie, the mannequin based on a death mask of a young woman who had drowned in the Seine in Paris in the 19th century. Bystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) has become increasingly accepted and expected as the years have passed, and we have even begun to make affordable machines to deliver a life-saving shock (defibrillation) …
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There is enthusiasm in politics about reducing regulation to stimulate creativity and economic growth.
Maybe. But reduction in oversight of medication and medical devices by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will probably lead to a proliferation of expensive potions and gadgets that don’t actually help.
The New England Journal of Medicine published an article detailing the near miss associated with an injectable monoclonal antibody for Alzheimer’s disease. …
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After writing about the coming demise of the Affordable Care Act, I began to think, again, about why it costs so much to deliver health care in this country. If it were cheaper, legislation to make health care a right, rather than the randomly distributed privilege it is now, would be so much easier.
Medical costs doubled every decade from 1960 through 2000. This happened in tandem …
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A recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reads like an expose. Well, at least three of the research articles do. So exciting! I don’t want medicine — my field — to be ethically unsavory, but it is sometimes. It makes me proud to see that it polices itself and that such information is published in a high profile journal.
The first article …
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An article released in the JAMA sites evidence that the suicide rate in America has risen by 24 percent in the last 15 years associated with a significant reduction in the numbers of psychiatric beds available. The U.S. has had a lower capacity for psychiatric patients than comparable countries in Europe for years, but between 1998 and 2013 that number dropped even further.
Waiting in the ER for days
This …
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A couple of weeks ago I started taking medicine to lower my blood pressure and another to reduce my cholesterol. This was a controversial move, given my deep distrust of the practice of medicine, when it is practiced on me, and especially regarding pharmaceuticals.
I know that, as a woman of 55 with a very active and healthy lifestyle, no chronic diseases and, most importantly, as a nonsmoker, I am at …
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After five years of doing bedside ultrasound, I’m still excited about it. Bedside, or point-of-care ultrasound is using an ultrasound machine during the physical examination of a patient in order to make a diagnosis. I use a pretty tiny machine that fits in my pocket. As an internist who works in the hospital and in rural clinic outpatient settings, I get to use my ultrasound all the time, and it’s …
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