The ear, nose and throat specialist who treated comedian Joan Rivers on August 28 has been identified as Dr. Gwen Korovin, a prominent New York physician who is known as a voice doctor to many entertainers and Broadway stars including Hugh Jackman and Julie Andrews.
With a physician who is an expert in airway anatomy at her side, and all the technologic advantages …
I have been following the progress of bedside ultrasound (using ultrasound as a diagnostic tool during my physical exam of patients) as it gets a foothold in standard medical practice since I first started learning to do it about 3 years ago. Every so often a study comes out which warms my heart as it proves that less (radiation, expense) is more in treating patients.
An article came out in the …
Not accustomed to visiting hospital executive suites, I took my seat in the waiting room somewhat warily.
Seated across from me was a handsome man in a well-tailored three-piece suit, whose thoroughly professional appearance made me — in my rumpled white coat, sheaves of dog-eared paper bulging from both pockets — feel out of place.
Within a minute, an administrative secretary came out and …
“All your patients will die. Maybe not today, but someday. The defining fact of life is that it ends. Only a fool would dedicate their career to fighting something that can never be beaten. Therefore, a doctor’s task cannot be to fight death. A doctor’s task is to heal when possible and prevent suffering always. Our calling is to support life. Fighting death may deprive patients of the opportunity to …
The case
A thirty-five-year-old female presents to the emergency department on a weekend afternoon with the following chief complaint: “I want to give up custody of my son.”
The patient is well dressed — and so is her four-year-old son, who is sitting comfortably on the bed playing a video game on his mother’s cell phone.
According to the patient, she is a single mother with no support system. Her son’s father deserted …
I have a patient who is a full blown sufferer of health anxiety. He firmly believes he has full-blown AIDS after a single extramarital sexual contact (non-genital) one month prior with a woman not known to have HIV. (Reality check: The other person didn’t have HIV, the specific contact as described was ridiculously unlikely to have transmitted the virus had it been present, and AIDS takes months to years to develop …
Everyone involved in health care, and particularly hospital care, has witnessed a sea change over the last decade. Things that were never even thought about, let alone formally taught to frontline doctors and nurses, have now come to the forefront.
Chief among these is the drive towards improving patient satisfaction and delivering a more optimal hospital experience. True, a large part of this is due to federal incentives and tying reimbursements …
7:00 a.m. Lights on.
Coffee, black and a banana. Paperwork. 27 patient visits, 3 emergencies, 35 phone calls. Lots of computer time. Some laughs and a few tears. Paperwork. Last family meeting. Coffee, black. In between: Thursday.
Was not completely successful in explaining to my frantic patient with the multi-page lab printout, how the problem was not that her tests were bad, but that the computer had used the wrong “normal” range …
Dear NICU nurse,
I couldn’t have done what I do without you, and the time to thank you publicly for all the ways you have helped me is more than overdue.
Thank you for teaching me how to handle 500 grammers when I was a medical student and had no clue. This showed me your tolerance and good nature.
Thank you for speaking up …
We are, I trust, all but universally familiar with the knee-jerk, or patellar, reflex. A doctor taps the patellar tendon with a rubber mallet, and our leg kicks forward in response.
The reaction is famously unthinking. In fact, it is literally so. What makes a reflex a reflex is that the brain is substantially uninvolved. The stretch of a tendon by the mallet …
Dr. Michael Pappas hates it when a nurse practitioner is called a mid-level provider: “Stop calling nurse practitioners mid-level providers.” So do I, though my reasons are a bit different. In order to understand them it will be necessary to revisit those dark ages, a time when such individuals were few and the roles played in the drama we know …
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
Chances are that many of you have duked this out with your college roommates back in the day, but how about this one? “If a doctor and a patient make an advance care plan, but when an emergency happens, nobody can find a copy of it, the proxy doesn’t know what’s …
Direct primary care (DPC) and concierge medicine are rapidly growing models of primary care. Though the terms are used interchangeably, both are not the same. Such liberal use of terms, many times by even those within the industry, confuses those who are attempting to understand how these primary care models operate. As former concierge physician for the Pebble Beach Resorts, and subsequent founder of one of the nation’s largest direct …
Attention all doctors: The first three are mine. The rest are from miserable colleagues. All true. And common. If you’re a doctor and you recognize anything on this list, please quit your job.
10. You feel nauseated when you see your clinic logo; you alter your commute to avoid streets with your clinic’s billboard.
9. Discouraged by the general despair among staff, you …
Today’s article highlights the lingering problem of physicians buying and selling prescription medications to patients — at a profit.
The medical profession has struggled with this controversial practice for more than 150 years.
In George Eliot’s 1874 novel “Middlemarch,” an idealistic young doctor named Tertius Lydgate questions the ethics of fellow physicians who make handsome profits prescribing and dispensing their own remedies to the townsfolk. His medical colleagues shun him for it.
Around …
While demographic data may suggest otherwise, I still consider myself a minority, albeit a less common one. I am a young woman in medicine, and I am a natural blonde.
I barely qualify for a prescription for eyeglasses, but I have found they give credence to my words and patients seem to take me more seriously. Perhaps three years of residency training …
As a fourth-year medical student, it was fairly easy to maintain a healthy lifestyle. When you have much leisure time and are relatively stress free, you can eat healthy, stay physically active and maintain quality mental health. However, as I begin the journey called residency, it is clear that the task of maintaining my own health will be much more difficult.
But the importance of this task should not be overlooked. …
Ink is everywhere these days, and I don’t mean on newspapers or in magazines. Tattoos are far more pervasive than I can ever recall in my fifty years. There was a time, when I was young, that boys were awestruck by the old Navy veterans, whose arms bore anchors, and the Marines with Semper Fi across their battle-scarred chests. Occasionally, when …
“Daddy, I think we have a flat tire.”
I just rolled out of the garage with my 4th grade daughter. It was Tuesday morning. Usual daily routine. Drop her off at school then go to work. A little different today as I was to lead an important meeting.
How could she possibly know what a flat tire sounds like? Now? Right now? She’s …
We are at a pivotal moment in health care. It’s changing so rapidly even the people leading the change can barely keep up. One of the biggest paradigm shifts over the last decade is the focus on quality over quantity. Improving the health care experience and patient satisfaction are also being talked about in boardrooms across the country (largely due to the link with reimbursements, but still unthinkable a few …
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