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Population Growth Is Dependent Upon Nutrition

Population increases when the birthrate exceeds the death rate, and decreases when the reverse occurs. So what does the world look like when there are too many people?

One way to approach this question is to consider what the limiting factors in population are. When, exactly, does the death rate exceed the birthrate? A key consideration is mortality. If people live shorter lives, the death rate goes up, and population goes down (or at least grows more slowly). What causes mortality to increase? Obviously things like wars, pandemics, and famines have an impact, but economist Robert Fogel argues that these are actually a relatively small part of the global mortality picture. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at The Daily Monthly*

Killer Dogs And US Dog Bite Statistics

Dog attacks are a major public health concern worldwide. In the United States, dogs bite more than 4 million people each year, occasionally resulting in fatalities. In an issue of Wilderness and Environmental Medicine (2009;20:19-25), Ricky Langley from the Division of Public Health in Raleigh, North Carolina published an article entitled, “Human Fatalities Resulting From Dog Attacks in the United States, 1979-2005.”

The statistics are instructive. In the years studied, there was an average of 19 deaths each year from dog attacks. Not surprisingly, males and children less than 10 years of age had the highest rate of death from dog attacks, with Alaska reporting the highest death rate. The number of deaths and death rate from dog attacks appear to be on the rise, perhaps for no other reason than there are more people and more dogs, in both absolute numbers and in proximity.

I am a dog lover (of friendly dogs), but am aware both as an owner and as an emergency physician that dogs will sometimes bite people, sometimes with serious consequences. Read more »

This post, Killer Dogs And US Dog Bite Statistics, was originally published on Healthine.com by Paul Auerbach, M.D..

The Man Who Died Well


One of my favorite patients died last week.

My reaction to this was not quite what you would think: I smiled.  No, I didn’t smile because of his death; I smiled because of his life.  I smiled because I got to be a part of that life.  His death wasn’t his tragic end, it was the exclamation point to his life.

I am around a lot of death – it’s one of the things that makes being a doctor different from other jobs.  My goal with all of my patients is to keep them healthy, to relieve their pain, and to do my best to keep them alive.  Ultimately, though, it’s a losing battle; 100% of them will eventually die.  That’s why I don’t like statistics about how many people who die due to inadequate doctoring.  Our job is to resist an irresistible force.  We are standing up to the hurricane, the avalanche, the flood. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Musings of a Distractible Mind*

Why Is It Taboo For Doctors To Discuss Death With Patients?

Back in the day when I was a newspaper reporter I completed a biomedical ethics fellowship at the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville, VA. In addition to sitting in on the hospital’s bioethics committee discussions, I spent much of the week shadowing a nurse in the ICU.

They called her the Death Nurse because her job was to intervene with doctors, nurses, patients and families when the time came for a patient to move from the ICU to hospice. While her title was Supportive Care, she flat out told her me her job was to help people die; not actively, but from behind the scenes by helping patients and those caring for them understand when the time had come to move from curative care to supportive care (email me if you’d like a copy of the article I wrote about her). Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Debra Gordon on Medical Writing (and other medical topics of interest)*

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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