Conditions

"Is she in pain?" I asked quietly as the pearlescent baby-shaped image on the screen folded its legs and then extended them. The radiologist doing my ultrasound had just finished pointing out a cluster of alarming abnormalities in our developing daughter, using a slew of medical terms my husband and I, both medical students, were grimly familiar with. Pleural ...

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Eat less, exercise more is a common refrain heard by millions of people with obesity. If only it were that simple. Decades of research shows obesity is a disease that is caused by a combination of genetic, environmental, biological, and behavioral factors that requires a range of interventions for treatment and prevention. The American Medical Association, the nation’s largest physician group, agreed when it officially recognized obesity as a disease ...

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Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians. A 55-year-old man is evaluated in the emergency department for a 2-day history of mild nausea and dyspepsia that is worse with fasting and improved with eating. He has also had a 24-hour history of frequent black stools and fatigue. He has no history of gastrointestinal bleeding, alcoholism, chronic ...

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Finishing my ER shift for the day, I waited for the shuttle at a busy intersection. Within a minute of drowning myself in music, I saw an obese man at the bus stop suddenly collapse to the ground. I removed my backpack and ran the fastest I have ever run in my life across the street to him. His body was shaking violently, and I waved and yelled to the nearby police ...

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It was 4:00 a.m. when I made it to my parents’ home. My mother called me to say that my father was having a hard time breathing. I could hear him struggling in the background. I ran inside to see my mother cradling my father on the floor — not breathing. I performed CPR on the man that gave me life! CPR on the person who just three months earlier ...

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It was another simmering-hot Texas day, and the AC was faltering in the family-practice clinic where I worked as a family nurse practitioner. Most of our clients were poor and spoke only Spanish. My nurse, Eliza, approached, wide-eyed. "There's a new patient — a woman named Maraby. She seems really angry," she murmured. "She's the color of Dijon mustard, and she's wearing a long, heavy wool cape. She looks like she's nine ...

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Over 80,000 new cases of bladder cancer are diagnosed every year. Of the new cases, over 62,000 are men, and over 18,000 are women. Whites have higher incidence rates than blacks, although black patients have higher mortality rates, particularly black women. The majority of cases are found with painless gross hematuria (although most patients with gross painless hematuria don’t have bladder cancer). Nearly 80 percent of patients diagnosed with bladder ...

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Part 2 of a series. My own self-appointed role as my father’s health care advocate during his prostate cancer battle was a natural consequence of my training as a medical researcher. After earning a PhD in medical science, I became the elected family health and wellness guru, offering insight into everything from hangnails to stem cells, with the ongoing disclaimer that “I’m not a doctor, I just play one ...

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Caregiving is often described as a sacrifice. One individual bears a burden to care for another. There's a connotation of drainage, evocations of burned-out batteries and tired limbs. I was a premedical student. I was aggressive in pursuing an MD. I wanted to be the best doctor I could be. I did not realize that required me to become a much a better person. I left school to care for my grandmother. ...

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