Physician Speaking by KevinMD is the only physician-run, all-physician speakers bureau.
We are practicing physicians and experienced keynote speakers, highlighting both large-scale events and intimate day-long workshops.
Today’s spotlight physician speaker is Dr. David Geier.
(Please visit our previous spotlight speakers, Dr. Shoshana Ungerleider, Dr. Jordan Grumet, and Read more…
You wake up one morning, and your shoulder hurts. You’re not sure why, and blame it on your sleeping position. Perhaps you bend down to pick something up, and when you stand up your knee hurts. These are very common stories heard from patients in an orthopedic surgeon’s office. The onset of joint pain without significant trauma is very common over the age of 40.
Perhaps you wait a …
Over the last 20 years, physical fitness as a means to improve overall health has increased among the over-40 set. This is great, right? Yes, absolutely. Athletes who remain active as they age do a better job than non-athletes in retaining lean muscle mass. They also show improved bone density, bone structure and bone strength. However, what physicians are seeing are injuries related to the increased level of activity.
One area …
If somebody asks you how many bones there are in a human body, please do not blurt out, “206.” The correct answer is nuanced. To respond accurately to the query, you have to address five questions. Who? What? When? Where? Why?
Consider first that humans vary from one another in facial features, hair color, height, and shoe size. Unknown to nearly everybody except …
Long ago primitive sharks had ridges running down their sides from gill to tail. Later, muscles grew into the folds, and eventually, the central portion of each ridge receded while the ends enlarged to form fins both fore and aft. All was well.
Then one day several hundred million years ago, a fish was swimming blissfully in a shallow pool. The tide went out …
All of our 200+ bones have names, which facilitates describing them when we cannot actually hold them or point directly at them. It might be easier to remember the names if they were familiar ones like Robert, Sally, and Kevin, but no such luck. Latin was the original language of science, so the bones received Latin names. Some of those were derived …
Residency training is an opportunity to get a good feeling of the specialty that interested you when thinking about what to pursue in the future. You may think that after applying for premed college, medical school and residency, applying for fellowship would be a piece of cake for you. Let me tell you: applying for fellowship is probably the hardest one among all other applications you went through so far. …
Pediatric physeal fractures have traditionally been described by the five-part Salter-Harris classification system.
Type I fractures occur through the growth plate. These injuries may present with normal radiographs, and the diagnosis is often made clinically when tenderness is palpated over the growth plate.
Type II fractures occur through the growth plate and metaphysis. Type II injuries are the most common physeal fractures.
Type III fractures occur through the …
A friend of mine recently underwent a total knee replacement. Although he did well and was pain-free, he did say that he felt he was on an assembly line. I asked him what he meant. As he was talking, I flashed back 30 years, back to a time when by today’s standards I would be considered a “good old country orthopedist.”
Thirty years ago, I moved to a small community to …
To listen to all those desperate to reform health care, you get the impression that physicians are pretty horrible people. We are all sexist, greedy, money grubbing tyrants who will perform unnecessary tests and procedures just to make money. We don’t care about quality or cost. We are killing off 250,000 patients every year with our ignored “errors.” We purposely keep our patients in pain, or we addict them to …
“You find joy that people are doing better because of what you did for them.” #BornToHeal
Courtesy of the American Medical Association (AMA).
A patient of mine recently came to see me in a follow-up appointment after an emergency department visit. He had been working out at the gym, on a hot day, after he had skipped breakfast, and after his usual routine he felt extremely lightheaded. Everyone told him he looked “white as a sheet”, and a physician who was at the gym told him he must go to the emergency department.
In …
An excerpt from Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery.
Near my office, there’s a breakfast-and-lunch joint where strangers sit down at shared tables. When Joseph, an attorney …
Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians.
A 79-year-old man is evaluated for a 3-month history of right hip pain. He points to the center of his right buttock when asked to identify the location of the pain. He has no radicular symptoms. He reports no focal trauma but believes his symptoms began after he stepped off a curb that …
Knee replacements are booming. Between 2005 and 2015, the number of knee replacement procedures in the United States doubled, to more than one million. Experts think the figure might rise sixfold more in the next couple decades, because of our aging population. Since many people receiving knee replacements are elderly, Medicare picks up most of the cost of such procedures. In response to this huge rise in expenditures, …
As I get near the completion of an intense 5-year orthopedic surgery residency program, I had an interesting interaction with our hospitals sub-committee specifically tasked to address duty hour and resident fatigue issues.
As they gave examples from other departments about changes made to their programs regarding duty hours, a clear-as-mud connection was continually made. They spoke of “improvements” made as the result of residents stepping up to serve as whistleblowers …
As far as follow-up appointments go, this one was routine. My 65-year-old patient had undergone hip replacement surgery two weeks prior, and we discussed her pain level, progress with physical therapy, and eagerness to return to everyday activities. But as she stood up to leave the exam room, I could tell there was something left unsaid. She stepped out the door then stopped, turned around, and leaned in close to …
I have lately been discussing the state of health care with a lot of doctors. I’m a doctor, and I’m also a consumer of health care services.
Imagine my surprise when I visited a local ER on a three day weekend, hoping to get some advice from someone who might be able to use the panoply of diagnostic tools available in the ED to help me mitigate the pain of a …
No one wants to hear that they have a disease. And yet everyone will develop some degree of degenerative disc disease (DDD) — or degenerative spine disease — over the course of a lifetime. DDD refers to a combination of age-related and wear-and-tear-related changes that occur within the spine over time. It is very common and a natural part of aging.
Most …
For many women, pregnancy is a wonderful experience. There are, however, many changes and challenges the mom-to-be can expect, and back pain is one of them. The good news for pregnant women is that the development of severe or debilitating low back pain is very rare.
The incidence of symptomatic low back pain that is severe is about 1 to 2 percent. …
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