Gorilla Glue and Heartbreak
“My friend said to tell you everything when I come,” she says as she opens a little zippered bag full of flakes. “My teeth are falling out and I can’t afford a dentist, so I use Gorilla Glue to glue back the pieces,” she says. She was referred to me for severe asthma, but she … Continue reading
Hubris
“I think he’s just anxious about it,” the medical student told me a few sentences into the presentation. His patient had had a spontaneous pneumothorax, a leak of air between the lung and chest wall, a few years ago, and now he had some uncomfortable feeling and was worried about a recurrence. I hadn’t heard the full story … Continue reading
Slow Medicine
Time heals all wounds, they say, or, in medicine, if not all, then many. But with our improved efficiency and throughput of patients, we fail to allow this most magical treatment to work. The pace and intensity of medicine has increased exponentially over the past several decades. We see more doctors, have more procedures, take … Continue reading
Need Oxygen to Smoke
Need Oxygen to Smoke? my editorial in the Salt Lake Tribune on the difficulty of tobacco cessation. What do you think about the policy at the Cleveland Clinic and other large employers that refuse to hire smokers? Below are my links that were embedded in editorial, but for some reason SLC trib removes them. …Even … Continue reading
Denial and the Imponderable Differences
David Foster Wallace “Infinite Jest” Page 604 …people of a certain age and level of like life-experience believe they’re immortal: …they deep-down believe they’re exempt from the laws of physics … And they’re constitutionally unable to learn from anybody else’s experience: if some jaywalking B.U. student does get splattered on Comm. or some House resident … Continue reading
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