Patients and caregivers writing on KevinMD about illness and the health care system from the other side of the exam table: navigating care, the doctor-patient relationship, being heard, cost, and what patients want physicians to understand. Physicians who have become patients write here too. For the record of what pain patients and physicians have said to each other about opioids since 2007, with patient authors cited at the same weight as physicians, see Opioids: what physicians and pain patients say, in their own words. For what patients pay and who is left out when physicians leave insurance, see Direct primary care: what physicians say, in their own words. For what patients, families, and physicians have said about dying, hospice, and the decisions families face, see End of life: what physicians say, in their own words. For what physicians and family caregivers have said about growing old, dementia, nursing homes, and caring for aging parents, see Aging and dementia: what physicians say, in their own words.
If you are a practicing physician then it probably already happened to you more than once. Mature and responsible patients tend to Google their symptoms, medication and illnesses on the web – a phenomenon commonly referred to as cyberchondria. Nine out of ten women more or less decide which oral contraceptive they will take and not the doctor does. She will just let the doctor know whether his choice …
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How a Google printout can strengthen your relationships with patients
A young man on my sobriety-based detox program (only after showing positive for opiates) admitted to heroin-usage, but hedged the matter saying it was “5 days ago.” His implicit presumption was that an isolated episode, days ago — compared to continuous, more recent, heroin-usage — would lessen the likelihood of his getting kicked off the program.
Is his story of “no heroin [ingestion] in the last five days,” likely, the whole …
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Consider half life during drug detoxification
Ten years ago this summer, my husband and I flew from California to Paris, planning to immerse ourselves in Parisian culture for three weeks. The second day there, I got sick with what appeared to be an acute viral infection. I spent most of those three weeks in a Parisian bed. Ten years later—I’m still sick. I didn’t research what I should …
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10 tips from 10 years sick
Rest in peace. These words are a common theme at funerals honoring loved ones. But many people die with no one claiming their bodies. For example, at hospitals there are unclaimed bodies of patients and the unborn. Corpses are found abandoned often in police cases. Mortal remains can go unclaimed due to insufficient funds for burial or cremation, insufficient concern for the deceased, and lack of available or known family …
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Hold funerals for unclaimed dead bodies
There is no “alternative medicine.” There is only medicine:
- Medicine that has been tested and found to be safe and effective. Use it; pay for it.
- And, medicine that has been tested and found to be unsafe or ineffective. Don’t use it; don’t pay for it.
- And, medicine for which there is some plausible reason to believe that it might be safe and effective. Test it and then place it into one …
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The effect of therapeutic touch is based on pure chance
Search engines and the Internet are impacting patient behavior—eight out of 10 people use the Internet to look for health information, but only 25 percent of those people verify the credibility of their information source before self-diagnosing. It gets even more complicated when patients order drugs directly over the Web.
The debate among physicians about the credibility of online information is as old as the Internet itself. As a caregiver, …
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Manage malpractice risks with self-diagnosed patients
There is nothing like a good community health fair. Away from the formal, detached sterility of the office this is an opportunity to meet patients on their turf. No longer adorned with white coat, power outfit and accompanying entourage, physician meets patient as just another member of the community, an equal almost. With a backdrop of blaring music, sweltering heat and flavorful eats people young and old gather, eager to …
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Why I love community health fairs
Things have been a bit tough of late, the bad economy is starting to bite, and you’re feeling the pressure. To top it all, your body has been acting strangely in ways it never has before. Your muscles twitch in funny areas for hours at a time, you tire easily, and you have fleeting pins and needles in your limbs. Over the weeks these symptoms have become worse. The last …
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The trouble with Dr. Google
The reality is that my job constantly challenges my sanity. Sometimes, I just want to scream.
Patient: “Doc, I don’t want to put any poisons in my body! Isn’t there a ‘natural’ remedy I can take?”
Doc: “No, I want you to take my poison! I haven’t poisoned my quota of patients this month and need to reach my goal.”
Poisoning patients really isn’t good for business. Why would a patient believe that …
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Fair balance gives natural pills and supplements an advantage
As medical practitioners, we are trained to fight disease, becoming familiar with all the metaphors of war, victory, failure, and the Cartesian views of deductive reasoning and mind being separate from body. Through said reasoning, we come to believe in a passive view of health; that health is an absence of something, in this case dis-ease. From that vantage point, it is no wonder medical practitioners have such high rates of burnout, …
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Why patients flock to alternative medicine providers
I worked with Joe over a year ago and now he returned to see me with a new problem. He had just been diagnosed with a rare degenerative disorder that would eventually rob him of the use of his limbs as his muscles weakened over time. Joe wanted to talk about how he could prepare himself for this decline.
Joe is in his sixties and has worked in high tech for …
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Making life meaningful despite a debilitating disease
If you’ve seen the news recently, you know that emergencies can happen unexpectedly in communities just like yours, to people like you. We’ve seen tornado outbreaks, river floods and flash floods, historic earthquakes, tsunamis, and even water main breaks and power outages in U.S. cities affecting millions of people for days at a time and now Hurricane Irene is coming. Health care professionals should be ready too.
I was …
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Hurricane tips that patients and health professionals should know
Whether you are going to the hospital for an outpatient procedure or whether you will be admitted to the hospital for medical illness or surgical procedure, there are certain things you must know and certain things you must do in order to ensure that your reasonable expectations will be met.
- You must become informed about the terms and limits of your health insurance policy. See if the fees you are being …
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Top 10 musts for your hospital visit
Today, healthcare is criticized by the public as too high on technology and too low in touch. Computers take patients histories, provide differential diagnoses, and even supply educational materials to patients. A new specialty, tele-medicine, offers healthcare services to rural areas that were previously underserved or couldn’t afford the latest diagnostic technology.
A humorous story about technology occurred when a patient’s secretary called to say that her boss was too …
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Why technology should never takeover the patient encounter
Seniors spend a lot of time at hospital ER’s. Now, a small but growing number of hospitals in the US have built ER’s especially for the aging patient – with wider hallways, motion detectors, hearing and visual aids. To me, this is long overdue.
Older patients are avid consumers of emergency medical services. Older people make up a significant percentage of the total population of ER patients. A 2008 Read more…
An ER specifically built for older patients
A 44-year-old man came to my office to begin Suboxone in hopes of stopping his injecting heroin. He was raised well by married parents, whose other four children have not indulged in narcotics.
He lives with a friend, unable to contribute to rent while “not working” yet somehow he affords $50 per day for narcotics through (self-admitted) hustling (comprising: working as one tentacle of the drug-dealers’ network, shoplifting, borrowing with no …
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Personal responsibility is needed to treat drug addiction
