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Atrial Fibrillation: When The Questions Outnumber The Answers

You may have heard that AF is a tough disease to understand. Questions far outnumber answers.

What causes AF?

Why do some not feel it at all, while others are incapacitated?

What’s the best treatment? Drugs? Ablation? Surgery? No treatment?

Should I take a blood thinner…and which one?

Where should one go for the best AF care?

This short email from a reader captures the essence of AF support group mayhem: Read more »

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

Do Martial Arts And Coumadin Mix?

I’ve not been blogging much lately because of work craziness and traveling.  One of my recent travels, however, was not for work but for pleasure.  I’ve been studying karate (a traditional Okinawan version called Shorin-Ryu) for over fifteen years.  There’s a national federation to which I belong and there are seminars three or four times a year taught by some of our more senior instructors.  This was one such seminar, and it focused on joint lock and grappling techniques, some of which our style shares in common with other martial arts such as Akido and Judo.

At one point I was working with a fifth-degree black belt instructor, “Bill.”  Super nice guy, and absolutely amazing in his speed and techniques.  He was also very kind in teaching me a number of useful tricks and nuances of the techniques we were working on.  There was a sequence which culminated in a choke-hold, and he was unhappy with the manner in which I was choking him.   Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Movin' Meat*

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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