I felt a woman’s uterus without her permission. How this happened, and why I thought I had done the right thing at the time, tells us something important about medical education and shows us why doctor/patient interactions often play out like conversations between earthlings and aliens.
To understand my inappropriate actions, you need to know something about the physical exams that we physicians conduct on our patients. More specifically, about the ...
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This series is brought to you by MedPage Today.
1. Omega-3s May Not Lower Cardiac Risk. Omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid supplementation does not appear to reduce the risk of cardiovascular or cerebrovascular events.
2. Low Preop Sodium Raises Mortality Risk. Preoperative hyponatremia significantly increased the risk of 30-day postsurgical mortality, a risk that extended across all subgroups of surgical patients.
3. When Drugs ...
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My son had been having episodes of belly pain right around his belly button for several weeks. I watched and waited. Between these bouts of mild abdominal pain he was completely fine - healthy appetite, active, happy. But I had a feeling something was brewing. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. The disease finally declared itself: several nights ago his belly pain was severe and unremitting. He ...
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We’re not going for sympathy here. Doctors as a whole enjoy less sympathy than many other professional groups (members of Congress enjoy the least, I would think), and that’s probably appropriate. They have high incomes and many prerogatives and rank highly in esteem polls as individuals, if not as a group. It’s not where they are that is causing the grieving, it is where they are coming from.
Let’s deal with ...
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A guest column by the American Society of Anesthesiologists, exclusive to KevinMD.com.
As an anesthesiologist and pain physician, I understand the complexity of pain management procedures required for chronic pain disease. Chronic pain is a disease like others such as hypertension and cardiac disease. Several interventional pain procedures can be dangerous, even in the hands of the most ...
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Really, sir. What were you thinking?
I’m talking to you—the anesthesia provider (I hate to think that you might be an anesthesiologist) who allowed himself to be videotaped while a patient injected his own induction dose of propofol. Most people know something about propofol even if they aren’t in the anesthesia business–that’s the medication that Dr. Conrad Murray gave Michael Jackson to everyone’s sorrow.
I would insert the link here, but the ...
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Here’s a little story from the early days of my first job as a chairman of surgery.
Shortly after I assumed the role of surgical chairman in a community teaching hospital at the ripe old age of 40 and having absolutely no administrative experience, I visited a mentor of mine whom I had known since I was a medical student. He had been serving in a similar role at a larger ...
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Unless you’ve lately returned from a retreat at a remote Cistercian abbey, if you’re interested at all in women’s issues you’ve probably read Anne-Marie Slaughter’s recent article in the Atlantic, "Why Women Still Can’t Have It All." The author eloquently tells how she left her dream job in the State Department as the first woman director of policy planning in order to return to her husband, her two ...
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When I was a surgical residency program director, I often wondered what the establishment, you know those guys who ran surgical education, was thinking. Some may remember the rule that a resident had to see at least 50% of the patients he operated on in the clinic or the private surgeon’s office in order to claim credit for having done the case.
There was the emphasis that still exists today on ...
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A few days ago, I came across an article entitled “Calling Dr. Google” by Jeff Jarvis. The writer describes his experience “Googling” his symptoms and finding that the internet brought him the correct diagnosis. He uses his personal story of appendicitis to point out that physician fear of information on the internet is overblown.
One would hope that the argument that you cannot find any trustworthy information on the web ...
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-Eric Topol, MD, author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine
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