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Why reading medical journals is so fascinating: Are low nicotine cigarettes...
As I come closer to actually retiring, one might think I would stop reading the journals that arrive weekly. But they're too interesting. Sounds strange, with a whole world of interesting things to...
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What are ACA subsidies and why is health insurance so expensive?
Several days ago I read a New York Times opinion piece by Zack Cooper about how extension of ACA premium tax credits would be a good thing, but would not solve our problem of health care...
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Constipation and Fecal Impaction--an odyssey
Constipation is apparently not interesting. Even the large bowel is apparently too boring to have a presence on the internet. On Amazon I found a lovely volume by several experts published in 1992...
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AI -- what it can and can't do for medicine
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been on the edge of my consciousness as a great hope for solving many of the problems in clinical medicine for maybe a decade. In 2011 IBM created a program called...
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Guess who finally got Covid?
The earliest cases of the novel coronavirus seem to have been in Hubei Province, in the city of Wuhan in China, possibly in November of 2019. The virus shares a family name with other more common...
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Nurse Practitioner Scope of Practice and the AMA
I have been working at CHAS Health, a community clinic serving Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho for a little over 3 years now. This is a different experience for me than my prior 35 years of...
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Why are new drugs so expensive? The absurdly high cost of newly marketed...
In the JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) there are occasionally amazingly interesting snippets of information, not long enough to be articles, written as letters. In the early June...
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We need to talk about abortion: Roe v. Wade and its overturn
On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that provided women with a legal basis for a right to get an abortion. (Full text of opinion and dissent here--pay attention to...
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Physician retirement--questions, thoughts, considerations...
I have been a practicing physician since finishing medical school in 1986. The year after that, I started my internship at the Johns Hopkins Hospital on the Osler medical service. I remember how...
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I broke some ribs
It was a beautiful early spring day. I was working in a little patch of native plants, clearing away some pine needles and pulling dandelions. It was pretty much perfect weed picking soil, moist with...
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Poem for the New Year
Happy 2022--let it be filled with good things.And on that note, I wrote a poem. (After reading Manifesto of Encouragement by Danielle LaPorte)Even now All is not lost--even nowyour frozen pipes are...
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An opinion--Love your neighbor
I've noticed that when I'm at work, I generally love my patients. I may have complaints about them, wish they would behave differently, get frustrated with their choices, but I do feel a warm...
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A little view of the climate and the other blog! And yay, Covid drugs!
I've been writing a few things about the climate at the other place, https://doctorjanicesblog.org/. Just thought I'd mirror those here. Since I last mentioned the climate in this blog, there have...
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Why I haven't been writing much: climate change
What I do most and what I do best is medicine. Healthcare. So I began to write (this blog was created in 2009) as I saw the compassionate practice of medicine being threatened by a system that has...
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Ivermectin for Covid--Does it work? We don't know.
Lately there has been quite a heated controversy about whether to use ivermectin for Covid-19. The FDA, a US federal agency responsible for providing unbiased information to protect people from...
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Racism, structural Racism and a wonderful speaker, Dr. Kimberly Manning
I just heard a talk by Kimberly Manning MD, Associate Professor of Medicine as well as the Associate Vice Chair of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Emory University School of Medicine, department of...
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Covid, re-evaluated one year later.
In early March 2020 I began to write posts about Covid 19. There were few places that people could get good information that addressed the big picture and made it possible to understand what was...
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Post Covid-19 Syndrome: dying of Covid is terrible, but some people get sick...
In my present job in a low cost health clinic I don't see much acute Covid. Patients in the infectious stage of the coronavirus are dangerous to everyone they breathe on and potentially infectious...
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What to do about a system that promotes police violence? Shift where the...
I've been thinking about police violence, crime, the criminal justice system and its horrors, racial barriers to success, fear and racism in general. It's been a busy few days as I've tried to educate...
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People still aren't getting it: Death counts from Covid 19 underestimate...
I have recently become aware that some people are mistakenly getting suspicious that Covid 19 death counts are an overestimate. That is probably because the numbers are awful and very hard to...
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