I complain about the state of U.S. health care a lot. It’s not driven by quality. It’s expensive. It’s corporatized. It undervalues and commoditizes clinical workers. It’s too controlled by insurance companies. It’s riddled with racial, educational, and socio-economic disparities.
I could, and often do, go on and on.
But the other night, I was called in to do a bilateral lung transplant for an exquisitely ill, but rather young woman.
Her OR …
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Medical specialties, especially within the medical community, are known to be identified as comedic stereotypes of themselves.
In addition to (or in conjunction with) being viewed as lazy, anesthesiologists are often stereotyped as being obstructionists to the operating room. A spot-on joke generated during the “first” COVID-19 surge in March of 2020 was in reference to Jerome Adams: “First Anesthesiologist Surgeon General, recommends canceling all elective cases.”
For better or worse, the …
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A moment in medical school that left a huge impression on me was when we had chairman’s rounds with the department of medicine’s chair. He was a renowned breast oncologist and researcher and described a bit of his process when interacting with a patient. The process he had developed over his years of experience was so fine-tuned that there was not a single movement, action, word, or breath that was …
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Yeah.
I said it.
As an anesthesiologist, especially as a cardiothoracic anesthesiologist, there are few things I am more interested in than how well or how poorly your heart functions and why. And a cardiologist can help me obtain a lot of vital information in that regard. But there several things a cardiologist cannot, and I argue, should not do, when it comes to the perioperative care of patients.
First, a cardiologist’s assessment …
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I have a major issue with MAC.
To be more specific, I have a major issue with how we communicate the concept of MAC to our patients, anesthesia care team members, and proceduralist colleagues.
MAC stands for “monitored anesthesia care,” and we tend to throw it around and use it interchangeably with a lot of other terms:
- Sedation
- Procedural sedation
- Conscious sedation
- Twilight anesthesia
- Light anesthesia
The fact is, these entities are not …
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1. Anesthesiologists are your protector
Think about this: An anesthesiologist’s job is to protect you from the harm your surgeon is causing. Seriously. A surgeon’s job, at its very essence, is to damage your body. Now undeniably, it is with the intention of causing greater good and/or fixing something that is already broken. But in order for a surgeon to help a patient, they take a knife, saw, drill, or hammer, …
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