I saw 17 patients in my primary care practice yesterday. Six of them were coughing.
One of the most basic parts of my job is sorting out who's a little sick from who's very sick, or in danger of getting very sick. How do I do that when so many people have the same symptom? And, as a patient, how do you know ...
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The bacteria that live in our healthy guts are a garden of cooperating and competing species that help to determine our intestinal health. When we take antibiotics, we kill countless bystander bacteria in our guts and sometimes develop changes in our digestion which can be severe. Clostridium difficile infection is one of these conditions, a superinfection with a bacterium which is pretty resistant to antibiotics and causes infection of the ...
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Medicines and other treatments need to be tested. We want reliable proof that something works and is safe before we recommend it. We don’t like the false dichotomy of “alternative medicine”. If there is good evidence that it works, it’s medicine. If it doesn’t work, it’s quackery.
It doesn’t matter who’s doing the quacking. A quack is a quack, even if ...
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Junior Seau had CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease known to afflict individuals who have sustained repeated head injuries over time.
Junior Seau played football his whole life and was never officially diagnosed with a concussion. Last May he sat down one day and shot himself in the heart. Dave Duerson, the former Bears safety, did this too, as a way to ...
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Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians.
A 38-year-old man is evaluated during a routine examination. He was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis 10 years ago and is currently asymptomatic. His last colonoscopy, performed at the time of diagnosis, showed mildly active extensive colitis extending to the hepatic flexure. There is no family history of colon cancer or colon polyps. His only ...
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An editorial by two oncologists in the New Year's issue of Annals of Internal Medicine discusses overdiagnosis, a controversial health problem that some have called "a modern epidemic" but others, including the editorialists, feel is a minor concern. Although many chronic conditions are overdiagnosed, cancer is the most thoroughly studied, as well as the most emotionally charged.
I am a generally healthy man with no family history ...
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This little cartoon, courtesy of xkcd, highlights a problem we have had for some time, but which is getting worse–highly antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Soon after the first antibiotics appeared, especially penicillin, doctors noticed the phenomenon of developing bacterial resistance to them. The cause is evolution in action. The replication time for bacteria is extremely fast, as short as ...
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Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians.
A 27-year-old woman is evaluated for a 4-week history of wheals, characterized by a burning sensation without pruritus. Each individual lesion persists for 48 hours and slowly resolves, leaving a bruise. Current medications are diphenhydramine, hydroxyzine, cetirizine, and oral contraceptives. The patient's mother has systemic lupus erythematosus.
On physical examination, vital signs are normal. She ...
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Add to the growing list of reasons antibiotics might not be good for you and your children: a recent study showing a statistical link between early ear infections and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
Researchers in the UK analyzed data from about a million children, looking specifically at the 750 who developed IBD (Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, mostly.) They then compared the kids with IBD to children without that ...
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I live in Louisville, KY, which is the epicenter for heart disease in the United States. My state ranks 49th out of 50 states for heart attack mortality. This is a complex issue with many contributing factors, including access to care, patient education, health insurance, cooperation between EMS and hospitals, among others. The thing is: heart disease is our number one ...
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-Eric Topol, MD, author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine
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Past 6 Months
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