I’m going to make a button to wear at work. t’ll say “I’m really only a dick at work”.
I’ve written before about my ‘game face‘ and how it’s not me, not really. It’s a Business Me, and it’s how I get through life at work.
(Is that a cop-out? Do I do it because it makes me more efficient, a better doctor, smoother, faster, or do I do it because it builds a bit of a wall between me and my real self and lets me get through the day without getting emotionally attached to every patient and their family?) Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at GruntDoc*
Phobias, such as the fear of flying, elevators or public speaking can disrupt people’s lives. Dr. Jon LaPook talks with psychologist Robert Reiner about how to overcome these fears with the help of virtual reality.
Seems like I’ve been on a real run of chest pain patients lately. Which is fine — it’s part of the gig. I did have a very interesting pair the other night. They were seen in sequence, right next to one another, in room 7 and room 8. They were both totally healthy women in their mid-fifties. And they were both over-the-edge, crazy, crawling-out-of-the-gurney anxious.
Anxiety is an awful red herring in the work-up of chest pain. People who are having an anxiety attack often if not always manifest some chest pain (pressure, tightness, whatever) as a prominent symptom of their anxiety. On the other hand, someone having a heart attack who is experiencing chest pain will also be anxious — and for good reason! Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Movin' Meat*
I guess I actually knew this intuitively, as the number of people I know who mention “trying antidepressants” rises, but the Archives of General Psychiatry article by Drs. Olfson and Marcus (August, 2009, 66(8), pp, 848-856) has confirmed my sense that antidepressant use has risen.
In fact, in the United States between 1966 and 2005 the annual rate of antidepressant use for people rose from 5.84 percent to 10.12 percent – translating into 27 million people over the age of six who were taking antidepressants. FYI, that makes antidepressants the most widely prescribed class of medication in office-based and hospital outpatient-based medical practices. Read more »
Interesting title, eh? A University of Queensland study has reported in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology that females who experience puberty before the age of 12 may be more aggressive, which seems perfectly expected to me!
Young girls who experience puberty are frequently the tallest kids in their classrooms, the first ones to have breasts, and are likely to be teased and approached in a sexual manner by older males! This context means they are more likely to date earlier, have opportunities to drink, smoke and become sexual earlier, etc.. In fact, these girls, although they get in more trouble at teens, tend to grow up to be very strong and resilient women – characteristics frequently correlated with aggression!
I am simply not surprised by these results but do hope that the results encourage schools, medical professionals and others who work with preteens to notice pubertal changes and help young girls deal with the pressure and changing peer and social status that comes with puberty.
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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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…
