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Integrating Wellness Into A Primary Care Practice

I often am asked how I incorporate wellness in our family medical practice, and I must admit that I’ve mixed feelings when it comes to the question because it implies that I’m not already trying to practice wellness simply by practicing medicine. I feel that the two are synonymous.

To those who want to know more about wellness and primary care, here’s my approach:

• I never try to sell anyone on a “wellness” program.
• I follow specific guidelines on certain chronic illnesses, mostly adhering to evidence-based guidelines and not expert opinion or opinion by committee.
• I offer the best advice I can to patients and try to guide them in the right direction when I feel they are taking pathways that worry me and that could be harmful (e.g. like using megavitamin and nutrient therapies or colonics, to name a few). 
• I try to be as cost effective as possible when it comes to treatment.
• I see our patients once a year to comply with the legal definition of “face-to-face visits,” but not because scientific evidence substantiates this time honored ritual as “wellness.”
• I use calendar reminders in our electronic health record, MD-HQ to set up needed labs like cholesterol or Hgba1C or to schedule flu shots based on guidelines.

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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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