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What Is A Medical Archeologist?


I’m becoming an amateur archeologist. The hilltop where we live is strewn with arrowheads and bits of Native American pottery shards. I have slowly, surely, trained my eye to find them. There is little flint here; so most of the pieces I find were made of quartz. (Hard to work with, but remarkably beautiful and almost always a brilliant white.)

My kids and I walk the red-clay paths and look down for bits of stone protruding up, especially after a good, soaking rain. Elijah, my youngest boy, was the first to find one. ‘Is that an arrowhead, Papa?’ ‘Yep, good eye son!’ He had found what was probably the point of an atlatl (a kind of mix between arrow and spear).

We look for rocks that seem shaped by human hands. That’s the ticket; look for something that seems to suggest a purpose or a history. Things with no shape, no marks from being worked, are probably not worth our time. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at edwinleap.com*

Emergency Medicine Residency Doesn’t Prepare Docs For The Real World

Emergency Medicine News:
February 2010 – Volume 32 – Issue 2 – p 5, 24, 25, 26

Residents training in large urban centers typically see more than 200 patients a day. They have access to all subspecialty care, typically available 24 hours a day. Residents have around-the-clock access to angioplasty, interventional radiology, hand surgeons, neurosurgeons, and plastic surgeons. Most practice emergency medicine with cardiologists and neurologists in the building or a short phone call away. Decision-making is shared, and occurs with a relative surplus of information and opinions and in a milieu of shared risk.

In reality, though, these very large and highly-specialized EDs with Level I trauma comprise less than five percent of U.S. EDs, according to the American College of Surgeons. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at GruntDoc*

Airplane Medicine: What Happens When You Answer The Flight Attendant’s Call For A Doctor

Rounding at 37,000 Feet

Anyone who has flown long-distance flights has heard the call: “If there is a doctor on board, please identify yourself to a flight attendant.” But it’s impossible to understand how that call induces the urge to flee to the lavatory and hide unless you are one of those unfortunate few who are on the hook, which is to say that you are qualified to respond, but you really really don’t want to.

“But Gee,” I can hear you think, “Aren’t you an ER doctor? Isn’t this sort of thing second nature to you? Don’t you revel in the adrenaline and glory?” Well, yes. But. First of all, there is the performance anxiety thing. I’m used to working with a very small audience. In Economy class, there may be 300 people watching me try to do my thing, and I’m just not used to that many people being in the exam room — and I know they are very interested in what’s going on. Read more »

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

Emergency Help: iPhone App Locates Closest Defibrillators (AEDs)

First Aid Corps, an organization working on helping the public respond to sudden cardiac arrests, has unveiled an iPhone app that can pinpoint the location of the closest automatic external defibrillator (AED) within seconds.

Currently the database is just beginning to fill up but First Aid Corps has partnered with The Extraordinaries, a volunteer organization, to have people locate and photograph AED’s in their community.

The app is free and you can download it and get started mapping AED’s and maybe help save someone’s life.

Here’s a promo video for the project:

Demo of the AED Nearby app:

AED Nearby iTunes link…

Flashbacks: AED Location Database Points to Nearest Life Saving Device; Do You Know Where Your AED Is At?

*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*

New Hospital Policy Leaves Cancer Patient In Tears

cryingpatientA dear friend of mine (let’s call her Amanda) has metastatic breast cancer. She’s far outlived her life expectancy, thanks to advances in targeted chemotherapy, but is beginning to need more medical care. She’s the divorced mom of two teens, with a loving extended family who keeps a close eye on her.

When Amanda was recently admitted to her local hospital with abdominal pain, a new policy resulted in some unintended consequences. While she was still in the Emergency Department, a nurse came by to ask if Amanda wanted to be an organ donor. The family members – keenly aware of her grave prognosis – assumed that the nurse knew about the cancer, and was asking this question because it had been determined that Amanda was about to die.

Tearful sobs ensued. Amanda’s sister called me the next day to tell me the news. Read more »

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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