During the last year I have been paying particular attention to lesser known and under appreciated miracles in medicine. It is a mystery why miracles of any sort would be under appreciated, but it is so very human to ignore things in plain sight which disrupt our deeply held belief systems or even are simply not what we are looking for.
For those readers who don't believe that they could actually ignore something ...
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I just took step three of the national board exams - the final in a series that all U.S. physicians must pass to practice medicine unsupervised. The two day exam, composed of multiple choice questions and simulated patient cases requiring free-text answers, brought up subjects that we haven't thought about since medical school (Sick children? Terrifying.) The test also shed some light into how doctors think under ...
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I am embarrassed. I am a specialist taking care of patients with inflammatory bowel diseases, which include Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. I spend more than half of my time at work related to research regarding the benefits and risks of treatment options for these diseases. Specifically, I aim to translate the vast medical literature published on this topic into tools for patients (and their parents) to help them better ...
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Brought to you by MedPage Today.
1. PFO Closure Still an Open Question. The negative results of three studies should have closed the book on patent foramen ovale (PFO) closure in cryptogenic stroke, but somehow the book is still being picked up.
2. Norovirus Main Gastroenteritis Culprit in Kids. Norovirus far surpasses rotavirus as the primary cause of acute gastroenteritis in children younger ...
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I am writing this letter because I feel that our leaders and lawmakers do not have an accurate picture of what it actually entails to become a physician today; specifically, the financial, intellectual, social, mental, and physical demands of the profession. This is an opinion that is shared amongst many of my colleagues. Because of these concerns, I would like to personally relate my own story. My story discusses what ...
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Today I’m doing anesthesia for colonoscopies and upper GI scopes. Nowadays we have three board-certified anesthesiologists doing anesthesia for GI procedures every single day at my institution. I’ll probably do 8 cases today. I will sign into a computer or electronically sign something 32 times. I have to type my user name and password into 3 different systems 24 times.
I’m doing essentially ...
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When I first lay eyes on Marilyn, I don’t think she will survive another week. Eighty-nine years old with short, curly gray hair, she sits in a wheelchair in the examination room. According to the nursing sheet, she weighs one-hundred and nine pounds. She wears a bulky white sweater over a gray dress that seems too big for her tiny body. Her ...
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First in a continuing series.
With as much detail as is useful, and as descriptively as I can manage, I'd like to relate what it's like to do an operation, from before laying knife on skin to after placing the bandage. I'm a general surgeon, so I choose sigmoid colectomy as my prototype; it's always been one of my favorites, although the particular ...
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Cleveland and northeast Ohio are not hospitable to private practice medicine. I should know. I’m one of them. Private practice is fading as health care reform suffocates it by design. When this occurs, the public will have lost physicians who, in my view, have practiced patient advocacy and service at a higher level than our employed counterparts.
Keep in mind that the first half of my professional career was spent as ...
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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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"A comprehensive and extremely useful roadmap for doctors."
-Eric Topol, MD, author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine
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Past 6 Months
Dear lawmakers: This is what it’s like to be a doctor today
Matthew Moeller, MD | PhysicianA gun owner responds to Sandy Hook
Edwin Leap, MD | PhysicianIs Chris Christie too obese to run for president?
Jeffrey Parks, MD | PhysicianPrimary care doctors may no longer be needed
Doug Olson, MD | PhysicianWalgreens moves into primary care, and it’s our own damn fault
Kevin Pho, MD | Kevin's TakeIndependent nurse practitioners are not the primary care solution
Reid Blackwelder, MD | Physician