Why am I writing this article? I admit, even to myself it seems a little random. But a combination of recent events and articles I’ve read lately lead me to write this, my pleading to doctors if you will. Let me brief you. Recently I wrote Acknowledging Vaccine Concerns. The main point of the article... Read more →

Nepal… Where on earth is that country? Mt Everest — the tallest mountain in the world. Mix them up and we have a country with a tag of one of the poorest in the world, an economy ravaged by a decade long war and a healthcare system that has done anything but to uplift the health standards. Headache!... Read more →

With healthcare being the stressful and serious environment it is, sometimes we can lose the lighter side of medicine. I wanted to share a few funny stories that have arisen from my training, in hopes that other professionals can get a chuckle, and share their own tales. 1. When I was a medical student... Read more →

The randomized controlled trial (RCT) is the gold standard for evaluating whether or not a therapeutic modality works. In RCTs testing the effect of acupuncture to improve symptoms, researchers often use “sham acupuncture” as a control procedure, on the theory that sticking needles into points... Read more →

Continuing on in our series we will now talk about abandonment and terminating the physician-patient relationship. We’ve previously talked about the contract and consent. Then we moved on to medical malpractice and causation. Finally we discussed informed consent. Now we move on to abandonment. Abandonment... Read more →

I read with interest my fellow Brain Blogger’s article on pharmacists and their essential value to the medical team. While pharmacists do not have prescribing power and often get a bad rap as being “pill counters,” it is clear to me that their position in the medical team food chain... Read more →

I frequently find myself having to explain the field of physical medicine and rehabilitation (PM&R) to the public, and sadly to a lot of healthcare professionals as well. If a cardiologist is a “heart doctor,” a pulmonologist is a “lung doctor,” and an orthopedic surgeon... Read more →

In medicine a lot of physicians categorize their patients as “good” patients or “bad” patients. Good patients are patients whose care is relatively easy for the physician to handle. The patient is compliant with recommendations, is motivated to get better, and is thankful for... Read more →

The article I posted a few weeks ago in regards to the H5N1 vaccine caused me to consider a potential pandemic and the health care workers’ obligation to work should the event come to pass. The World Health Organization estimates that today a pandemic is likely to result in 2 to 7.4 million deaths... Read more →

In response to my last post about informed consent in my Medicine and Law series, several commenters made the point that informed consent is more than just getting a form signed. That ideally it should involve a dialogue between patient and doctor. That the burden of trust is on the doctor to inform... Read more →

In this series of posts we are examining the ethics behind medicine. This includes the entire ethical spectrum of behavior by doctors, patients, nurses, and the entire medical system. Here we present another case scenario about a patient. A 36 year old man presents to his plastic surgeon for cosmetic... Read more →