Conditions

Effective clickbait doesn’t just happen. It’s carefully crafted. Take this wildly misleading article from CNN: Not exercising worse for your health than smoking, diabetes, and heart disease, study reveals. It’s one example — among many generated daily by various news outlets — of how a mundane observational study can be transformed into viral internet gold. In the days after it was published, this story was liked and shared hundreds ...

Read more...

Comparing the 2018 U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommendation statement on prostate cancer screening in the October 15th issue of American Family Physician with its previous recommendation, the first question family physicians ought to ask is: What new evidence compelled the USPSTF to move from recommending against PSA screening in all men to determining that there was a small net benefit for screening in some men? ...

Read more...

About one in fifty people reading this essay will be diagnosed with kidney cancer at some time in their life. In fact, one out of one people writing this essay has already been diagnosed with kidney cancer. (I had a small tumor removed from my left kidney not long after I turned 50.) But how many people diagnosed with kidney cancer have been overdiagnosed with the condition? And what does moving to Florida have ...

Read more...

I don’t know how many times a patient has told me, “I was in therapy once, and it didn’t help.” My response is always: “That’s like saying 'I saw a movie once and I didn’t like it'.” That usually breaks the ice just a little. In primary care, we certainly run into a few patients with chronic mental health problems that could use some long-term, in-depth counseling. But usually, patients in my practice ...

Read more...

A true allergic reaction is one of the most terrifying events in medicine. A child or adult who is highly allergic to bee stings or peanuts, for instance, can die within minutes without a life-saving epinephrine injection. But one of the most commonly reported allergies — to penicillin — often isn’t a true allergy at all. The urgent question that faces physicians every day in emergency rooms and operating rooms is ...

Read more...

It was a slow day in the emergency department. I was sitting across the bedside from my patient who came in for a left forearm infection checkup. She was a 73-year-old female with a history of diabetes. She was elegant and soft-spoken. Prior to examining her wound, which had been worsening, I asked her what her A1c number is. She wondered what an A1c number was, and I explained that ...

Read more...

During my urgent care shifts, I see 20 to 30 people with viral upper respiratory infections. They are all feeling miserable, and they just want to feel better. They want an impressive-sounding diagnosis to justify their suffering to themselves, their spouses, and their bosses. They want a prescription medication which will immediately cure their illness, so they can get back to their lives. Their faces fall when they receive their ...

Read more...

Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians. A 79-year-old man is evaluated for pain in the buttocks region. He was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin large B-cell lymphoma 6 months ago. Although his lymphoma has responded well to therapy and he is without evidence of active disease, he required hospitalization three times for chemotherapy-associated complications during his treatment ...

Read more...

“He’s having a senior moment.” That dismissive phrase seems harmless, but, in reality, it leads to devastating, debilitating disease. I firmly believe that a generation from now, people will not know the pain of watching a loved one slip into oblivion. But the only way we will get there is we stop dismissing memory loss and other behaviors as “normal aging.” The recent news that former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor ...

Read more...