March 24th, 2007 by Dr. Val Jones in News
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In my last blog post I was describing how adversity can be used for good, and as I was reading the medical news this morning I found another great example. While gardening, a British man was bitten on the neck by a spider. Now, the report doesn’t say exactly what type of spider this was, but judging from the outcome it was probably not a black widow or brown recluse. I’m assuming that the insect was some sort of common garden spider, though it must have had “fangs.” (Imagine my sister recoiling in horror here.)
As it turned out, the spider bit the man right next to a growth on his neck that he hadn’t noticed before. When he went to the doctor’s office to have the bite inspected, they found the growth and decided to biopsy it. The growth was cancerous, and the medical team was able to remove it before it had spread anywhere.
The little spider inadvertently saved a man from cancer. As he weaves his web, nestled between the coarse, hairy leaves of turnip plants, this tiny creature may never understand his contribution to humanity. Small actions can have a positive ripple effect, and a seemingly bad experience can save a life.
This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.
March 23rd, 2007 by Dr. Val Jones in True Stories
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My mother had a good deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.
–Mark Twain
Parenting is a difficult job – and one that few would sign up for given full advanced disclosure. I suppose my parents had their share of woes – my near-death experience as an infant, my being mauled by a vicious dog as a toddler, my getting lost in the woods (collecting poisonous toad stools) at age 4, my facial surgery after a bicycle accident, my head injury from a fall out of the tree house, my toboggan versus barbed wire fence encounter, my front teeth versus metal bar incident, my rib fractures and nearly ruptured spleen from another fall from a bunk bed, and my ski accident requiring knee reconstruction surgery… I guess you could call me accident prone.
Looking back it makes sense why my parents encouraged me not to play contact sports, but pursue academics. I took to jogging and tennis instead (yes, I managed to sprain my ankle and catch a racket to the eye nonetheless), and physical training in the gym. But my redirection towards reading and homework was probably a good thing – as it helped me to develop intellectual discipline, and at the very least kept me out of the ER.
So what is the moral of this story? I guess if you have a kid who’s physically challenged – or at least seems to be a magnet for high velocity metal objects, do not lose heart. With a little direction, he or she can grow up to become a doctor who helps other kids who injure themselves repeatedly in creative and unexpected ways.
Were you an accident prone kid, or do you have an accident prone kid? I’d like to hear some of your war stories!
This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.
March 22nd, 2007 by Dr. Val Jones in True Stories
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Growing up in Canada, my family spent a lot of time in the car. While my European friends would tell me how they could drive through 4 countries in a matter of hours, in Canada I couldn’t get part of the way through our smallest province in the same time period. Canadians have to travel long distances to get anywhere, which is part of the reason why they’re such a tolerant and patient lot.
So on these long drives (long before the days of portable entertainment devices) my family would have to think of ways to pass the time. Our favorite game was inspired by “20 questions.” We called it “the animal guessing game.”
It basically worked like this – you thought of the most unusual animal you knew of (perhaps something you’d seen on Animal Kingdom or in an animal encyclopedia) and the rest of the family would ask yes and no questions until they guessed what it was, or all agreed to being stumped.
Now, most of us would systematically narrow the field of possibilities by asking typical questions related to size, territory, habitat, skin type (fur, scale etc.) and so on. But my younger sister would always begin by asking the same question:
“Does it have fangs?”
At the time I thought she was hopelessly silly and incapable of systematic analysis. So few animals, after all, would fall into that category. Surely that wasn’t a good lead question.
But as I reflect on my sister’s perseverance on fangs, I realize that she was using an emotive hierarchy. To her, animals with fangs were so frightening, that she wanted to get it out of the way first thing – to be sure that we weren’t going to be spending time reviewing the life cycle and eating habits of animals with sharp teeth.
You know, it may seem funny, but I think that when it comes to matters of medicine some patients feel the way my sister did about the animal guessing game. They’re in unfamiliar territory, they are afraid of a real or perceived threat of a painful test or procedure, and they are internally focused on that threat to the exclusion of the big picture.
Doctors have the natural tendency to be removed from the emotional priorities of patients. We think that the patient is most interested in the evidence behind certain tests, the statistics, the technical aspects of a procedure – but sometimes as they try to comprehend the details of your informed consent, they really have one burning question:
Does it have fangs?
This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.
March 21st, 2007 by Dr. Val Jones in News
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As spring approaches, we can expect a new onslaught of pollen, bugs, and mud puddles. Mosquito eggs will hatch in stagnant water, and a new generation of hungry little disease vectors will be lurking in wooded areas, awaiting their first meal.
Luckily for those of us who live in North America, those annoying mosquito bites are unlikely to infect us with malaria.
A team of scientists committed to eradicating malaria (one of my personal favorite parasites) has taken a new approach to reducing transmission rates: creating a strain of malaria-immune mosquitoes.
I had been under the mistaken impression that mosquitoes lived in perfect harmony with malaria parasites, but apparently the organisms can make them quite ill as well. Not ill enough to die immediately (hence their ability to spread the disease) but ill enough to die prematurely.
So if we could create a malaria immune mosquito, we could give them a survival advantage over their peers, thus slowly influencing the mosquito population in favor of the new strain. This could result in a new population of mosquitoes who could not harbor malaria.
In humans, malaria parasites have learned how to attach themselves to red blood cell proteins and incubate inside the cells. In mosquitoes, the parasites latch on to a protein (called SM1) on the surface of epithelial cells of their gut lining. Through the miracle of genetic engineering, we’ve managed to alter the SM1 proteins in certain mosquitoes, making them immune to invasion by parasites they ingest through infected blood.
Although the immune mosquitoes are not ready for prime time release in malaria endemic countries (the research only showed that the scientists could genetically engineer resistance to one strain of malaria), it sure would be interesting to see if we could use mosquitoes themselves to fight a disease that claims the lives of over one million people per year.
This is a rare case of a problem becoming the solution!
This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.
March 20th, 2007 by Dr. Val Jones in Medblogger Shout Outs
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I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.
–Mark Twain
As we consider the wastefulness of the healthcare system, I have heard many people complain that physician salaries are one of the main culprits in escalating costs.
Dr. Reece compares the average income of some of the highest paid physician specialists, with that of hospital executives, medical insurance executives, and fortune 500 CEOs. Check this out:
Highest Paid Physicians
1. Orthopedic, spinal surgery, $554,000
2. Neurosurgery, $476,000
3. Heart surgeons, $470,000
4. Diagnostic radiology, Interventional, $424,000
5. Sports Medicine, surgery, $417,000
6. Orthopedic Surgery, $400,000
7. Radiology, non-interventional, $400,000
8. Cardiology, $363,000
9. Vascular surgery, $354,000
10. Urology, $349,000
Executive Pay for Massachusetts Hospital CEOs
1. James Mongan, MD, Partners Healthcare, $2.1 million
2. Elaine Ullian, Boston Medical Center, $1.4 million
3. John O’Brien, UMass Memorial Medical Center, $1.3 million
4. David Barrett, MD, Lahey Clinic, $1.3 million
5. Mark Tolosky, Baystate Health, $1.2 million
6. James Mandell, MD, Children’s Hospital, Boston, $1.1 million
7. Gary Gottlieb, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, $1 million
8. Peter Slavind, MD, Massachusetts General Hospital, $1 million
2005 Total Annual Compensation for Publicly Traded Managed Care CEOs
1. United Health Care $8.3 million
2. Wellpoint, Inc, $5.2 million
3. CIGNA, $4.7 million
4. Sierra Health, $3.4 million
5. Aetna, Inc, $3.3 million
6. Assurant, Inc, $2.3 million
7. Humana, $1.9 million
8. Health Net, $1.7 million
Top Corporate CEO Compensation
1. Capital One Financial, $249 million
2. Yahoo, $231 million
3. Cedant, $140 million
4. KB Home, $135 million
5. Lehman Brothers Holdings, $123 million
6. Occidental Petroleum,, $81 million
7. Oracle, $75 million
8. Symantec, $72 million
9. Caremark Rx, $70 million
10. Countrywide Financial, $69 million
But the real story here is the salary of our primary care physicians – those unsung heroes of the front lines. KevinMD pointed out a recent news article citing $75,000.00/year as the average salary of the family physician in the state of Connecticut, and that their malpractice insurance consumed $15,000.00 of that. Although this is certainly below the national average for pediatricians (they start at about 110,000 to 120,000), I’ve seen many academic positions in the $90,000 to 100,000 range.
Now I ask you, does it seem fair that the vast majority of physicians (the primary care physicians) are making one tenth of the average hospital executive salary? Should doctors really be in the cross hairs of cost containment?
This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.
