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The 12 STIs Of Christmas

My yearly Christmas favorite reposted, courtesy of the British National Health Service (BNHS):

The 12 STIs Of Christmas

(Click on the title image to watch)

I have seen several searches of this blog for the BNHS and wondered why. The answer: The site no longer carries the wonderful show, for reasons unknown to me. As for the searches, I guess the Christmas season has people thinking about sexually-transmitted infections (STIs) set to a Christmas tune.

Merry Christmas!

*This blog post was originally published at GruntDoc*

ER Doctors And Burnout

Via Balkans Business News:

One in two emergency care doctors will suffer a burnout during their career, according to a survey of French physicians, published online in Emergency Medicine Journal. The research was funded in part by the NEXT NURSES’ EXIT STUDY (‘Sustaining working ability in the nursing profession – investigation of premature departure from work’) project, which received more than EUR 2 million under the ‘Quality of life and management of living resources’ Programme of the EU’s Fifth Framework Programme (FP5).

The responses showed that the prevalence of burnout was high, with 1 in 2 emergency care doctors identified as suffering from it, compared with more than 4 out of 10 of the representative sample. Physicians had the highest burnout rate in the two age groups, between 35 and 44 and between 45 and 54.

Expectedly, it’s international…

*This blog post was originally published at GruntDoc*

Narcissism: No Longer A Personality Disorder?

Via an article in The New York Times entitled “Narcissism No Longer a Psychiatric Disorder”:

Narcissistic personality disorder, characterized by an inflated sense of self-importance and the need for constant attention, has been eliminated from the upcoming manual of mental disorders, which psychiatrists use to diagnose mental illness.

As Charles Zanor reports in today’s Science Times, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — due out in 2013 and known as D.S.M.-5 — has eliminated five of the 10 personality disorders that are listed in the current edition. The best known of these is narcissistic personality disorder.

So, blogging is normal then? Kinda takes the fun out of it…

*This blog post was originally published at GruntDoc*

American Medical News: “Welcome To Our Archives”

Via the American Medical Associations’s American Medical News article “Welcome to our archives“:

Now, our extensive online archive, paired with search and article collections by topic, puts thousands of stories at your fingertips.

Add to that a growing collection of Web-only content, such as our interactive tool for tracking health-plan earnings and a “Vault” page that will take you directly to articles and multimedia on topics of enduring interest (www.amednews.com/vault).

Most of that older content has been behind an access-control wall. By knocking down that barrier, we are making available 10 years of full content and several years more of selected earlier articles. All told, about 15,000 articles now can be searched and read.

We invite our readers to visit the archives and link to our articles from their own sites, blogs and posts.

Thanks, AMedNews! I suppose an I told you so would be rude, so I won’t.

*This blog post was originally published at GruntDoc*

The NNT: Quick Summaries Of Evidence-Based Medicine

I think I blogged this before, but didn’t describe it much. Allow me to rectify that mistake.

The NNT.com (“Number Needed To Treat”) is an ever-expanding website which boils down high-quality reviews of medications and interventions and presents its recommendations in a much more approachable green-yellow-red “warning triangle” format rather than some ratio.

While I won’t use this as a single source to change my practice, I’m going to have to do some more research on some of the [questionables] of our age (i.e. Octreotide for variceal bleeding, PPI infusions for upper GI bleeding, etc.) — just two of the studies that fly in the face of current practice.

An aside: While inhaled corticosteroids for asthma aren’t beneficial in the review, what it doesn’t tell you is that the Feds think they are, and will grade your asthma care on how many of your asthma patients get a prescription for them, so be aware.

Graham Walker, M.D. is behind this, and good for him.

*This blog post was originally published at GruntDoc*

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