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What To Do When Your Patient Wants To Leave The Hospital Against Your Better Judgment?

When a patient decides they are leaving against medical advice what responsibility does the physician have to their care?  When I was a resident in training, and even early on in my position as a hospitalist, I would get a call from the nurse that  Mrs Smith was demanding to leave the hospital against medical advice.  I would tell the nurse “Fine. Let her go. I’m not her father.”  I would tell the nurse to discharge Mrs Smith with no medications and leave it up to them to find follow up.

I would suspect this is a prevalent attitude for many hospital and emergency based physicians.   I’ve seen it over and over again.  And I still see it today.  Many doctors and nurses feel obliged to let grown men and women make poor decisions.    However, being a grown man or woman able to make poor decisions is apparently not enough to keep a doctor for being sued and losing that lawsuit because a patient chose to make poor decisions.   Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at A Happy Hospitalist*

What To Do When Your Child Glues Her Eye Shut

This little girl accidentally got Super Glue onto her eyelid. She came to the doctor without pain and she was able to move the eyeball under the lid but could not open it.

Her doctor in Decatur, Ala gently irrigated the eye area with normal saline and applied antibiotic ointment and a gauze patch over the eye area but the lid remained stuck together. The next day he was able to gently pull the lid open.

If you should ever glue parts of your body together with Super Glue (cyanoacrylate), the treatment is easy. Acetone, the ingredient found in nail polish remover will dissolve Super Glue. A Q-tip with acetone, gently applied to the area, will dissolve the bond without damaging the skin. Don’t pull the skin apart, but gently roll or peel it.

If Super Glue gets in the eyeball, the eye protein will disassociate from it over time. A warm sodium bicarbonate solution eyewash will help remove the adhesive.

Photo/story credit: Consultant

*This blog post was originally published at EverythingHealth*

In Case Of Emergency: How To Prepare For The Unexpected

Would you know what to do if you needed an ambulance or if you had to go to an emergency room?  During 2005, an estimated 115 million visits were made to emergency rooms in the United States – up 31 percent from 1995. About 14 percent of patients arrive via ambulance. Emergency rooms across America are overloaded – partly because many of the almost 50 million uninsured use the emergency room as their primary physician (and partly because we tend to focus on treatment of illness rather than prevention – but that’s another blog post).


During the next two segments, I will take you way behind the scenes and give you tips on how to be prepared in case the unexpected happens and you end up on your way to an emergency room.  This week I play the part of a patient with chest pain and take you inside a New York City ambulance with paramedics Ray Cordi and Hanan Cohen.  Next week my colleague, Richard Schlesinger, and I continue your tour inside the emergency room at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, the first time this institution (where I am on staff) has ever allowed such inside access to the media.


Watch CBS Videos Online

**This blog post was first published at CBSDOC.COM**

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IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

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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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