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The Economics Of Medical Jargon

Many of the peculiar terms and phrases we’ve learned in medicine have found a new use in cyberspace, as titles of websites (consider 10 out of 10, The Central Line, or this blog — and that’s just emergency medicine sites).

But that’s the virtual world — what about the real world? I [recently] saw a couple of products that make me think medical parlance could sell physical products. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Blogborygmi*

Haiti: Life And Death Decisions

A premature baby and a woman giving birth must share the only oxygen tank in a hospital in the poorest part of Haiti, Port de Paix. Dr. Jon LaPook recounts the harrowing experience.


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An Earful And A Mouthful: Insulted Woman Bites Off Man’s Ear

So I’m listening to the radio [yesterday] when I hear a story about a woman who was called “fat” by a 24-year-old man at a party. What does she do?

The Omaha World Herald is reporting that she bit off more than she could chew by literally biting off his ear.

Police at a Lincoln, Nebraska hospital responded to a call in the emergency room at 3:25AM on April 28th when the unnamed, one-eared man claimed 21-year-old Anna Godfrey bit off his ear for calling her “fat” at a party. The ear chunk is missing in action. Read more »

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

Romance, Hypotension, And The Little Blue Patch

A patient was brought in around midnight as a “possible stroke.” She was a 60-something woman who had suddenly become unresponsive.

She and her husband had been making love at the time, and he noticed that she was no longer conscious. Unable to revive her, he had called 911. She looked bad — but it was strange. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Movin' Meat*

RXplore: New e-Tool Helps Doctors Find Drug Reactions

Jon D. Duke, M.D., a medical informatics fellow at the Regenstrief Institute at the Indiana University School of Medicine, has created an easy-to-use graphical online tool called RXplore that allows physicians and other healthcare providers to retrieve adverse reaction data for multiple medications simultaneously, and with an intuitive visual representation.

With RXplore, a physician can easily call up a visualization of the top 10 side effects of a specific drug or ask only for side effects relating to a particular specialty, such as gastroenterology. Alternatively, the doctor may request a snapshot of those drugs that cause a particular symptom, such as liver problems. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*

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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