A play in 3 acts’; Weighing the Risks vs. Benefits of Research
Act I. Can women intubate? Two South Korean authors asked whether physician gender has a significant impact on intubation success, and found that “Female physicians are not inferior to male physicians in performing emergency endotracheal intubation.” Act II. It’s not about American women – South Korea is really sexist. The article had a swift and … Continue reading
Save The Champagne
“Denitza Blagev has a blog in the works,” I saw Lauren comment on Facebook, and until then it had not occurred to me to actually start one. We had talked about the possibility and I’ve enjoyed writing for a long time, but I took about a decade off. After medical school, I was so submerged in the … Continue reading
On Smoking and Death
“I don’t want to quit smoking,” my patient says with her face firmly set. I’m taken aback. “I don’t think that’s true,” I say,” you just told me you quit, then you started again because your brother and grandson died in the past few months and you’re struggling with the loss. I don’t think it’s … 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
Can I Become A Doctor Online?
The cost of medical care and the cost of education in general is sky rocketing. But it is much worse to be at the nexus of these two endeavors – Medical Education. The current path to becoming a doctor in the US involves four years of university followed by four years of medical school. Each … Continue reading
Customer Satisfaction
I recently changed my children’s dentist because his office was too nice. As with their doctor, it is impossible for a lay person to have any idea whether their dentist is clinically competent or good. Most of us choose our dentists the same way we choose physicians – by personal recommendations from people we know, … Continue reading
Anxiety
Anxiety ranks among my least favorite diagnoses. In medicine, we have a long history of blaming a variety of diseases on anxiety. Even in the recent past we attributed gastric ulcers to stress until it was proven that a bacteria that lives in the gut is responsible. Indeed, who would have thought: a bacteria living … Continue reading
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