“Your hands feel like velvet,” the 94-year-old woman told me as I pushed on her abdomen in the emergency department on a Friday night.
“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me all day,” I told her.
“That’s pretty sad,” she said, and her abdomen quivered as she suppressed a laugh.
I walked out of the curtained room and briefly presented her findings to the resident on call. In return, he showed me ...
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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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As I have mentioned before, all surgeons think they are the best. Of course when we ourselves need surgery, there is a bit of a dilemma deciding who is the best qualified to carry out the procedure. So when I realized there was a strange looking skin lesion in my right inner thigh, I decided only the best would do to operate me.
In my rooms I informed the sister I ...
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Consumerism in health care is coming to mean patients must shop around for the best price — for a doctor’s visit, Cipro, health insurance and maybe even your next operation. The marketplace gurus are telling us we can buy health care like TV sets and search for the lowest price tag.
But can you really choose a place for surgery based on the ...
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A guest column by the American Society of Anesthesiologists, exclusive to KevinMD.com.
February is a little more than candy hearts and heart-shaped arrows—February is prominent as American Heart Month, helping doctors and patients better understand cardiac health and how to best care for one of the most important organs.
Each medical specialist takes great care to focus on ...
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There is a strong relationship comparing sports to the military, business, and also to medicine. Young athletes, in their late teens and early 20s, are mostly brawn and use their strength and speed to achieve success early in their professional careers. As the athlete matures in their late 20s and early 30s, the physiologic processes slowly decrease and efficiency and maturity and other cerebral skills emerge.
There are 2 rainbow arcs ...
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Christmas morning at 1:30 am the phone chimes away. What the … I’m not on call.
“Please call Dr. Dred for patient Selma, perforated colon at local ER,” read the text message.
Why are they calling me, I’m not on call. Dr. Young is. Maybe something’s happened and they can’t find him.
So, I called. It was just as reported. There was a fifty year old female with abdominal pain for three days, ...
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Not long ago, I blogged about a plastic surgeon who aggressively pursues patients who refuse to pay her bills. The state is suing her to make her stop and also considering lifting her medical license. The central theme is that she makes patients who she sees in the ED to sign a form stating that they will pay her. It is unlikely that the patients are aware of ...
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The American Journal of Surgery had a nice little (38 patient cohort) study from the VA database that tried to determine the process by which patients make informed decisions on elective surgery. The results were rather surprising, at first glance.
Sixty-nine percent of patients decided to have surgery before meeting their surgeon, and 47% stated that the surgeon did not influence their decision. Although the surgeon was an important source of information ...
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For most people, anesthesia is one of the more mysterious branches of medicine. What we do for patients is done, generally, when they are asleep. You the patient don’t exactly know what we are going to do, or how it’s done, but you put yourselves in our hands willingly. It’s sort of a weird relationship we have with other humans. We have done our job right if our patients don’t ...
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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
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