February 8th, 2010 by DrCharles in Better Health Network, True Stories
Tags: Family Medicine, Funeral, Patient's Death, Patient's Funeral, Primary Care, Slice Of Life
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On the way to the funeral you wonder how you’ll be received by the grieving. Although you are confident that your care for the deceased was sincere, professional, and adept, you still question if others will so assume. There is silence in the car. This is a trip you make alone.
You manage a bitter smile as you recall stories the patient shared in unguarded moments, behind the door of a small examining room. How he beamed with content at the thought of his grandchildren; how her eyes glowed as she remembered the view from the Eiffel Tower; how the tears and sobs and memories of a lost child wracked his otherwise impenetrable façade. Sometimes you knew his spirit as well as you knew his medical illnesses, and often he hoped you would tend more to the former. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Examining Room of Dr. Charles*
February 8th, 2010 by Debra Gordon in Better Health Network, Health Policy
Tags: CBO, Check Please, CMS, Costs, Finance, GDP, Healthcare reform, kids, Medicare, Rising Costs, Spending, Who Will Pay
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A couple of recent news stories reminded me of the dirty little secret about healthcare that no one wants to talk about, the proverbial elephant in the room. All those pills, surgeries, x-rays, medical care? It costs money!
Yes, Virginia, quality medical is not a right, not guaranteed in the Constitution, not something good-hearted corporations and companies, whether for-profit or not, are obliged to hand out like candy corn at Halloween. It costs money. Billions of dollars a day.
This appears to be something we all forgot in the warm fuzzy moments of watching military transport planes fly critically ill people out of Haiti to Florida hospitals. Who was going to pay for all this medical care? For the months of hospitalizations and rehabilitation these people were going to require? When the state of Florida, rightly so, asked the same question, prompting the halting of those military convoys, it ended up on the receiving end of a world-wide outpouring of boos and hisses. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Debra Gordon's Musings on Medicine and Health Care*
February 8th, 2010 by DrWes in Better Health Network, News
Tags: Arrhythmia, Atrial Fibrillation, Cardiac Electrophysiology, Cardiology, Magnet, NBC, Robotic System, Stereotaxis, Today Show
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The NBC Today Show aired a segment on the Stereotaxis robotic system for performing catheter ablation of atrial fibrillation using magnetically-steered ablation catheters yesterday (video here). It sure generated a lot of buzz around our hospital. While I share the reporters enthusiasm for all the gadgets and gizmos (what doctor-engineer wouldn’t like such neat toys?) the enthusiasm should be tempered with a strong dose of reality regarding this technology and any atrial fibrillation procedure.
First is the claim that the patient will be cured with “85-90%” certainty. While these success rates have been reported using this technology for the much simpler atrial flutter ablation, this level of success has not been substantiated in meta analyses of atrial fibrillation ablation studies to date: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Wes*
February 7th, 2010 by Peggy Polaneczky, M.D. in Better Health Network, Health Tips, News, Research
Tags: Bloating, Feeling Full, Obstetrics And Gynecology, Ovarian Cancer, Pelvic Pain, symptoms
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Thanks to Toni Brayer for pointing out this new study on ovarian cancer symptoms published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
This study confirms previous studies which found that ovarian cancer, long thought to be a silent disease in its early stages, does indeed have symptoms. The problem is that those symptoms – bloating, urinary frequency, pelvic pain, early satiety – are common, non-specific and, according to this new study, 99% of the time not due to an underlying ovarian cancer.
That’s good news, of course, for women with these symptoms. But bad news for those hoping for a means of early detection for ovarian cancer, since early symptom recognition is neither sensitive nor specific enough to be useful as a screening test on a population basis. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Blog that Ate Manhattan*
February 7th, 2010 by Jonathan Foulds, Ph.D. in Better Health Network, Research
Tags: Addiction Medicine, Cigarettes, Primary Care, Quitting Smoking, smoking, smoking cessation, Tobacco Control, Tverdal
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The journal Tobacco Control has on its website a list of the top 10 most read articles each month. One paper that has been near the top ever since it was published in 2005, was written by Dr Kjell Bjartveit and his colleague Dr Tverdal, on “Health consequences of smoking 1-4 cigrettes per day.”
The study included 23,521 men and 19,201 women, aged 35–49 years when they were initially screened for cardiovascular disease risk factors in the mid 1970s and followed them up to 2002. The researchers calculated the total risks of death and relative risks adjusted for confounding variables, of dying from ischaemic heart disease, all cancer, lung cancer, and from all causes, and examined the effects of regular smoking of only a few cigarettes per day. Read more »
This post, Classic Study: There’s No Safe Threshold For Cigarette Smoking, was originally published on
Healthine.com by Jonathan Foulds, Ph.D..
On the way to the funeral you wonder how you’ll be received by the grieving. Although you are confident that your care for the deceased was sincere, professional, and adept, you still question if others will so assume. There is silence in the car. This is a trip you make alone.
