Gastroenterologists and physicians writing on KevinMD about digestive disease: colonoscopy and when to stop screening, celiac disease and gluten, the liver, pancreatic enzyme insufficiency, the tests marketed for leaky gut, and what patients are fed in hospitals. Board-review cases make up part of this archive. One maintained record draws on this archive: Cancer: what physicians say, in their own words.
Hepatitis C is one of the most common chronic infectious illnesses in the U.S. today and affects nearly 3.2 million Americans. Complications of hepatitis C infection include liver cancer as well as cirrhosis. Many patients with chronic hepatitis ultimately develop liver failure and will die without liver transplantation. In the last year, a new drug class has entered the market and can produce cure rates in excess of 90 percent.
These …
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How hepatitis C treatment is a glimpse of health care’s future
I recently was invited to participate in a research study, looking at the economic impact of a new drug for the treatment of Clostridium difficile infection. The new drug, called fidaxomicin, has been available for a few years and has proven efficacy in thousands of patients but is generally very expensive. The study will follow patients after their hospitalization and delve into analyzing the monetary costs associated with the medicine, …
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It’s time to study the economic impact of new drugs
Everyone likes to be recognized for a special achievement or accomplishment. Every career has special awards and commendations for everything. While there’s no reward that matches cold hard cash, many of these honorable mentions have no tangible value whatsoever. Pull into a fast food parking lot and you may see a parking space designated with a sign proclaiming, employee of the …
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Getting congratulated on hand washing. Really?
There she lay: a 59-year old woman who had become increasingly disoriented and confused. Not only did she have an infection in her bloodstream, years of alcohol abuse had taken its toll on her liver, leaving her skin yellowed.
“Welcome to the ICU,” I thought. In contrast to my previous clinical experience, I found this patient encounter unsettling.
No conversation.
No personality.
No interaction.
She was nothing more than a body in a bed punctured …
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A medical student, molded by experiences with patients
“Safety first” is a mantra of today’s hovering parents. It’s the default explanation that a parent invokes when an edict has been issued that cannot be challenged or reversed.
“Mommy, can I please have a water pistol?”
“I’m sorry, honey. You know how Daddy and I feel about guns. This is a safety issue. Now go and practice your violin and afterwards help yourself to some kale chips.”
The safety concept has crept …
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Feeding tubes and the culture of patient safety
I walked into room 30 to find two eager sets of eyes awaiting me. One set belonged to a young man, late-twenties, muscular and imposing, sitting in a chair in the corner of the room. His eyes were hazel brown, big and inviting, relieved at seeing my entry into their sheltered world. The other set of eyes, darker brown and magnified by her gold-stemmed glasses, belonged to my patient, a …
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A thank you to a mother and son in the ER
The mortality from colorectal cancer has decreased substantially in the U.S. during the past decade. While some of the improvement is due to better cancer treatment and reduced risk factors, the largest proportion is thought due to screening. The concept that early detection saves lives has now become well recognized. The harms of screening — particularly among individuals with limited life expectancy — are less well appreciated.
Royce et al. recently published a …
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Colorectal cancer screening in the elderly: Can we stop the train?
A 75-year-old woman with progressive constipation. An 82-year-old man with unexplained anemia. A 39-year-old mother of two with intermittent blood in her stool. These are three of my patients. And sadly, they are three of nearly 150,000 Americans diagnosed with colorectal cancer every year.
March is National Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month for good reason. In the United States, colorectal cancer is the third most commonly diagnosed cancer. It is also the …
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March for colorectal cancer awareness
March is colon cancer awareness month. We have made tremendous strides in the fight against cancer especially colon cancer.
Between 1991 and 2011, U.S. cancer death rate decreased by 22 percent (1.5 million lives saved), and colon cancer death rate decreased by almost 50 percent. This decrease coincides with widespread adoption of colorectal cancer screening particularly colonoscopy.
Despite this progress, colon cancer is still the 2nd leading cause of cancer death in …
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3 ways to prevent colorectal cancer
I was glad she never asked if I had done this before.
My first nasogastric tube was placed on an elderly woman with chronic liver disease. As her illness worsened, it gradually turned her skin yellow, her abdomen swollen, and her mind foggy. One day, we realized that she was at too high a choking risk to swallow her medications herself. She would need a plastic tube to do it for …
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Lessons from my first nasogastric tube
Fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) has emerged as an increasingly common treatment for patients with refractory Clostridium difficile infection (CDI). Unlike standard antibiotic approaches, which only exacerbate dysbiosis and may perpetuate CDI recurrence, FMT restores normal gut microbial community structure and function of the gastrointestinal tract. However, a number of challenges need to be overcome before this procedure is widely accepted in mainstream clinical practice.
Before I jump into highlighting …
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4 reasons why fecal transplants aren’t mainstream. Yet.
Whenever I am asked this question, I can’t help but think of the punchline to a joke that was once supposed to be funny but would now be considered beyond the pale in all respects, so I won’t repeat it. The punch line is: “Just lucky, I guess.” That’s the short answer to why we gastroenterologists work in our field. Despite the distasteful aspect of human waste and the perverse …
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Doctor, why do you enjoy practicing gastroenterology?
Millions of people are diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) every year making it one of the most common gastrointestinal (GI) conditions. Despite its prevalence, there remain many misconceptions about IBS among both patients and doctors. Here we review some basic concepts in hopes of demystifying this nebulous syndrome.
What is IBS?
Irritable bowel syndrome is defined by a constellation of symptoms including abdominal pain and altered bowel habits (diarrhea or constipation) …
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IBS is no BS
It’s been a long day, and you just want to decompress. My boyfriend tells me about his day. I get to hear about the insane amount of reading he has to do for graduate school, or about the occasional annoying customer he’s had to deal with at his part-time job as a bank teller. When it’s my turn to decompress, I usually gripe about a patient or two from the …
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Taking care of patients who stop caring about themselves
Parents are appropriately expressing concern about the safety of Miralax®, a commonly used stool softener in kids, after a recent New York Times article exposed a potential association with long-term use of the drug and undesired behavioral side effects. As the article explains, the FDA has awarded a research grant to a team at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) to directly address these concerns.
Miralax® has been …
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The truth about Miralax in children
The really incredible advances in the treatment of hepatitis C bring to life several relevant questions as we move forward into 2015. First, who should be treating hepatitis C patients (primary care providers, gastroenterologists, infectious disease specialists)? Second, can we really afford to use these new treatments? I recently discussed this topic with my GI and hepatology colleagues in AGA Perspectives, the bi-monthly opinion magazine of the American …
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Advances in hepatitis C treatment. Why aren’t they being used?
I see patients with abdominal pain every day. Over my career, I’ve sat across the desk facing thousands of folks with every variety of stomach ache imaginable. I’ve listened to them, palpated them, scanned them, scoped them and at times referred them elsewhere for another opinion. With this level of experience, one would suspect that I have become a virtual sleuth at determining the obvious and stealth causes of abdominal …
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How much testing should you do in chronic abdominal pain?
Colonoscopy is the most effective test for the detection and prevention of colorectal cancer, the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States. An estimated 14 million colonoscopies are performed in the United States every year. About 20 to 40 percent of these colonoscopies have inadequate bowel preparation according to multiple studies.
Inadequate bowel preparation is costly to the patient, the health care system, and society.
In one study, poor …
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The hidden costs of an inadequate bowel preparation for colonoscopy
Sovaldi (sofosbuvir), the new hepatitis drug manufactured and marketed by Gilead Sciences, has garnered considerable media attention over the last several months. The drug was approved by the FDA in December after phase III clinical trials showed it was highly effective in the treatment of chronic hepatitis C (HCV) infection. In fact, with an overall SVR (sustained virologic response) of 90 percent for the genotypes studied, Sovaldi may represent a cure for many of the 3.2 million Americans afflicted …
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Sovaldi: The drug pricing paradigm has shifted
