Happy, I wanted to share with you this picture of a woman who’s lost all hope. I saw her a few years back during my psychiatry rotation. As you can see, it looks like she’s going bald, but in fact, during her fits of rage and depression she’s actually pulling out her own hair. How sad is that? Just another example of what we docs take care of on a daily basis.
Man, that’s unbelievable. I don’t know much about classic female pattern baldness. From what I’ve read it’s usually a diffuse loss of hair everywhere or a central expansion of hair loss but rarely does it encompass the entire scalp. It’s usually caused by hormones, aging and genes. In advanced age, I’ve seen more than my fair share of elderly women who have more hair on their chin then they do on their head. Read more »
You may have noticed, uncharacteristically for me, that I haven’t posted a blog in week. I thought it would be better to allow the readers to post their own reflections, and you did — with comments ranging for unabashed pride to skepticism to disdain for the law and the American College of Physician’s (ACP’s) role in bringing in about.
I respect the principled arguments made by those who believe that the legislation gives the government too much control or those who fear that it will add to the deficit and public debt, even though the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says otherwise. But there is one claim made by some of the critics that sticks in my craw, which is that the legislation will result in “massive cuts” to Medicare. Here are the facts. Read more »
President Obama likes to shake things up. He has named Dr. Donald Berwick to head the Medicare and Medicaid Agency known as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). This is a huge government agency with a budget of over $800 BILLION a year. That is more than most countries in the world have. Dr. Berwick would be a major force in implementing the new health laws and changing Medicare to be more efficient and cost effective.
The average person probably doesn’t know who Dr. Don Berwick is, but he is a big name in the healthcare industry. A pediatrician by training, he is the president of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) and is a national leader on quality and patient safety. By telling stories that people can relate to, he is a transformational leader for reducing hospital errors and reducing variability in care. Read more »
An Australian company called Simavita is releasing an incontinence detection device to be used in nursing homes across New South Wales. The SIMsystem uses a strip that detects liquid and a cellular device to send a note to a nursing station or a care provider.
From the product page:
The SIM™box, when fitted into the individual resident’s stretchpants (SIM™pants), transmits sensor readings from the SIM™strip in the SIMpad® over a wireless network to the SIM™server. The SIMsystem™ Manager software running on the SIM™server then detects key information about continence events and determines when to alert care staff about an event requiring attention.
Alerts are sent via text message to the carer’s mobile phone or via the facility’s paging system if preferred. As carers are often unable to immediately respond to events, the software will display a summary log of alerts and manual observations can also be entered. The final bladder chart includes all observations in one easy-to-read report. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
It’s said that everything comes with a price. The average American now lives almost thirty years longer than a hundred years ago. But for millions of people, the price of longevity has been Alzheimer’s disease. The greatest fear my patients express to me is, “I think I’m losing my mind.” Read more »
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
A reader sent me this really sad story that got me thinking about hair restoration for women
An Australian company called Simavita is releasing an incontinence detection device to be used in nursing homes across New South Wales. The SIMsystem uses a strip that detects liquid and a cellular device to send a note to a nursing station or a care provider.
