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Memorial Day: Thank You To Those Who Serve(d)

Better Health salutes the U.S. military for their service to our country. Blog posts will resume tomorrow.

Raw Milk: Tipping The Odds In Favor Of Bacteria

It is hard to get infected. The immune system is robust and has a multitude of interlinking defenses that are extremely efficient in beating off most pathogens. Most of the time.

Fortunately, it is a minority of microbes that have evolved to be virulent in humans. Bacteremia is common with our own microbiome. When you brush or floss, bacteria leak into the blood stream:

We identified oral bacterial species in blood cultures following single-tooth extraction and tooth brushing. Sequence analysis of 16S rRNA genes identified 98 different bacterial species recovered from 151 bacteremic subjects. Of interest, 48 of the isolates represented 19 novel species of Prevotella, Fusobacterium, Streptococcus, Actinomyces, Capnocytophaga, Selenomonas, and Veillonella.

but with a good immune system, low virulence bacteria and no place to go, unfortunately the bacteria rarely cause infections.

Even heroin users rarely get infection. Heroin is a rich melange of bacteria and, on occasion, yeasts (I hate to say contaminated, since avoiding microbes is hardly a worry of heroin manufacturers), and the water used for injection is rarely sterile, yet infections are relatively rare despite the filth in which many heroin users exist.

I used to be somewhat fatalistic about hospital acquired infections. However, as the institutions in which I have worked have proven, almost all infections in the hospital are preventable if the institutions aggressively pursue high standards of care.

There are many systems in place in society to prevent infections: flush toilets, good nutrition, public health, vaccines, antibiotics, good hygiene, and an understanding of disease epidemiology, and I suspect people forget there are bugs out there that are pathogenic, just waiting to sicken and kill us. At least a couple of times a year I see patients come into the hospital, previously healthy, who rapidly die of acute infections.  But for most people, most of the time,  it takes a lot of effort to get an infection.

From my perspective we are Charlie Chaplain on skates , mostly unaware of the infections that awaits us if we do something silly, Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*

What Americans Can Learn From England’s Experience With Electronic Medical Records

The development and use of an electronic medical record is extremely important for communication, rapid diagnosis and clinical decision making, increasing efficiency in working up patients, decreasing the cost of duplication of testing and time delays in medical care and treatment.

There are many other advantages of using a functional electronic medical records. A person could be anywhere in the world and have his medical information immediately available. The results of all testing should immediately be communicated to the treating physician. All imaging studies should be digital.

Patients’ physicians could immediately read and use them for their clinical decision making.

These are only a few of the advantages of the electronic medical record. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Repairing the Healthcare System*

Differences Between American And German Healthcare Systems: One Physician’s Perspective

I have been in Hamburg, Germany for the past five days. I enjoyed an amazing opportunity to visit one of the world’s most respected heart rhythm labs. Among other things, the main purpose was to learn a new way to ablate atrial fibrillation.

It was an incredible learning experience, one for which I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the kind and generous people of Dr Karl-Heinz Kuck’s EP lab. Though these people are famous, they treated me as a respected colleague.

Details of all that I learned regarding this newly-approved ablation technique is a matter for future posts. Suffice it to say, I already feel like a better AF doctor.

For now, may I highlight a few of the more striking differences between Europe and the States, as noted by a Kentuckian on his first trip across the Atlantic? Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Dr John M*

Will Low Income Americans Use Personal Health Records?

The Society for Participatory Medicine was well represented last week at the 14th  ICSI/IHI Colloquium. (ICSI is the Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement, a small midwestern think tank that’s way too poorly known.) SPM members who presented:

  • Jane Sarasohn-Kahn of Health Populi gave the keynote for Day 2
  • Jessie Gruman, four time cancer patient and founding co-editor of our journal, gave an important breakout session, about which I’ll be writing soon. (Jessie is founder and president of the excellent Center For Advancing Health.)
  • Brian Ahier presented on the status of health IT, as Meaningful Use rolls out. (“You can’t measure the improvements that you gotta measure, unless you have computers keeping track of it.”)
  • I gave a half-day pre-conference workshop titled “Participatory Health: Reshaping Patient Care.” I’m told the workshop had 40-50% higher registration than usual: interest in participatory medicine is strong.

An unexpected bonus was that right outside the workshop door, a poster presentation addressed some questions people often ask about patient participation and online health records:

  • Will patients with problems actually use a PHR (personal health record)? (Many observers say PHRs are a non-starter, a pointless exercise.) Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at e-Patients.net*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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