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How To Brighten Your Physician’s Day

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I walked around the office today with a little extra spring in my step. It felt really good to be a doctor this day.

So when good sensations come, I always look back on why they happened. (Like cyclists do when they have really good legs. Maybe it was that bee pollen?)

But like having good legs on the bike, good sensations in the office come from more than one thing.

Eight hours of sleep?

A morning hug from my best friend, my wife Staci?

Two coffees?

A really good blueberry muffin?

No arrhythmia overnight in the AF ablation patients?

Good thresholds on yesterday’s (evidenced-based) ICD?

Perhaps.

But I felt really springy after being greeted by this… Read more »

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

Can Botox Be Done Well?

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Reader Question:

All I see online is bad Botox stories.  Can this ever be done well? Why is it so popular?

Botulinum toxin injections temporarily paralyze muscles where they injected. While this sounds scary, it can be done to reduce certain facial movements that make people look concerned (the look of consternation,) and older (crow’s feet,etc). As is usually the case in plastic surgery, too much of an otherwise good thing can make people look weird. Just look at Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Truth in Cosmetic Surgery*

The Boundaries Between Doctor And Patient

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This post from Kelly Young on Howard Luks’ blog asks when patients cross the line with respect to their own advocacy.  It’s worth a peek.

The question of boundaries between doctor and patient is interesting.  All of my patients are empowered in some way.  The extent and level of that empowerment is personal.  On our own there are few lines and little with respect to boundaries.  We have effectively unlimited access to information and resources.  And how far we go to look after ourselves and our kids has few limits.

But when we enter into a relationship with a provider, we’re no longer alone.  It’s unreasonable for a provider to tell a patient Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at 33 Charts*

The Right To Bear Salt: Is Sodium Restriction Warranted For The General Population?

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Q. What is the difference between a public health expert and Il Duce?
A. Mussolini was not nearly as arrogant as a public health expert.

In prior posts, DrRich related how two major publc health efforts over the past few decades – the effort to put all of us on low-fat diets, and the effort to reduce everyone’s cholesterol levels – have amounted to massive experiments, based upon insufficiently-tested assumptions and surmises and hypotheses which the experts arrogantly (and incorrectly) determined to be fact, and which were conducted upon the entire American population without its knowledge or consent.

These public health experiments cost billions of dollars, needlessly transformed large swatches of American industry, and (at least in the case of low-fat diets) likely produced significant harm to the citizenry. Furthermore, despite such results, these misbegotten public health efforts have inured Americans to the notion that it is right and proper for government experts to determine for each of us what we must and must not eat.

DrRich now feels obligated to call his readers’ attention to yet another experiment which these same public health experts have launched, an experiment under which each of us – once again – is to become an unwitting research subject, an experiment whose results are unpredictable, but which has a realistic chance of producing harm to many of us. DrRich speaks, of course, of the new US dietary guidelines, published earlier this year, regarding sodium. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at The Covert Rationing Blog*

Are There Too Many Health Chats On Twitter?

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Is it me or has the number of medically related twitter chats just exploded in the past 4-6 weeks or so? In the past few weeks, there has been a lot of discussion about the proper and improper use of the twitter hash tag. I mean if more than 50% of the tweet are hash tags, then I gotta problem with it.

Twitter by it’s very nature is whiny. I mean, one of twitter’s first functions back in the day (in my opinion) and one of the first uses of twitter for the newer user is a place to vent. And, people complain, whine, vent about a great variety of stuff. But, not about the number of tweet chats that have been popping up recently?

Maybe I’m crazy, but will twitter ever get to the point when there are too many chats? Probably not. However, something that I have seen in the past few weeks is the selection of what I call the “golden” time of 9pm Eastern Time.

There is probably some solid data out there somewhere, but Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Family Medicine Rocks Blog - Mike Sevilla, MD*

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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