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Practicing Zen meditation and being a doctor
I just got back from a 7 day Zen meditation retreat in Northern California. I have done 3 of these in the last 10 years, about as frequently as I get my teeth cleaned, and similar in some ways. They...
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How to make your own ultrasound gel (which is also sterile and edible and...
I have been doing lots of bedside ultrasound lately and realized how useful it would be in areas far off the beaten track like Haiti, for instance. With a bedside ultrasound (mine fits in my pocket) I...
View ArticleBacteriophage therapy, biome reconstitution, heparin--potential scientific...
During the last year I have been paying particular attention to lesser known and under appreciated miracles in medicine. It is a mystery why miracles of any sort would be under appreciated, but it is...
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How to perform a fecal transplant--why make this so very difficult?
Fecal transplant, thanks to the recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine out of the Netherlands, has made it to the front page, the big time. In my inbox today was a link to a how-to...
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Recycling the community physician: how should we really be training the next...
I have been spending time at an academic medical center lately and I’m noticing some obvious flaws in our method of shaping the doctors of the future. When I went to medical school I was trained by...
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Female feticide --ethical issues of ultrasound in India and China
The use of ultrasound has had a large impact on health care in resource poor countries. This article details some of the research that has been done overseas to look at the impact on bedside ultrasound...
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Is a high calcium diet and calcium supplementation bad for you?
An article from Sweden was recently published showing that in a very large group of women, over 60,000 of them, followed for 19 years as part of an also very interesting study of the effectiveness of...
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23andMe: why might a person want to have their genes explored?
My son, who is 19, wanted a nice jacket and his genome for Christmas this year. He had found out that a company called 23andMe would tell him about his genetic susceptibility for diseases and his...
View ArticleWhat does American healthcare want?
I know what I want, in healthcare, that is. I want it to be efficient, effective, thoughtful and inexpensive. I want it to create healthy people who don't need very much health care. I want it to...
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Hospital readmissions: what exactly is the deal with this?
Medicare has been costing the government a scary amount of money for many years, and the very popular program, established in 1965 under President Lyndon Johnson to pay for health care for seniors, has...
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Attending the Annual Meeting of the American College of Physicians in San...
The American College of Physicians is an organization of internal medicine doctors, about 133,000 of us, which had its inception in 1915 with the aim of promoting the science and practice of medicine....
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How to learn bedside (point of care) ultrasound: tips for the interested...
I first picked up an ultrasound transducer 17 months ago, at Vicki Noble MD's emergency medicine ultrasound course at Harvard University. I had just barely heard about using ultrasound as a clinical...
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What does expensive care look like and who are the 1% of patients who use...
I have been working almost exclusively in hospitals for the last 17 months and I often get a chance to rub shoulders with the 1%, that is to say the people whose poor health puts them in the position...
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Healthcare economics and history--how we got here and how we might get out....
Hello and thanks for coming.I’m going to be talking about what has taken me away from my practice this last year and what I’ve learned about how healthcare is doing and why it’s so expensive. I’m going...
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A rant on the hopelessly ill (of course it's not their fault) and how maybe...
I have been working in the intensive care unit and have been finding it ethically difficult to facilitate the care of the some of the hopelessly and incurably ill patients who rotate through. Many of...
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A better POLST (Physician's Orders for Life Sustaining Treatment) and...
To resuscitate or not to resuscitate--that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler to beat the heck out of a person on his or her way out in the hope of saving his or her one precious life, or to allow...
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Why are health insurance premiums still rising this fast? Blue Cross proposes...
This morning when I got the local paper, I was greeted with a lead article which reported that Blue Cross of Idaho was asking the county to pay 24.7% more for employee's premiums in 2014. Nobody can...
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Dear FDA (Food and Drug Administration), Please stop regulating the wrong...
The Food and Drug Administration was created in 1927 in order to carry out the mission of the Food and Drug Act put into effect by Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. In the early 1900's and before, patent...
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How to take a doctor sabbatical
In October of 2011 I left my job of 17 years, which I loved, mostly, and started a 2 year sabbatical. Since sabbatical implies that there is one year of rest every 7 years, I have built up at least 2...
View ArticleBe back soon!
After doing a week of night shifts, I went to Newark, NJ to take a 3 day course to get me sufficiently full of details of physics and anatomy to take the written test for ultrasound certification...
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