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 →

The current US healthcare system is broken. Few would argue this point. Rising costs, decreasing reimbursements, more lawsuits, insurance hikes, and an aging population are just some of the difficulties that face both physicians and patients today, and the situation doesn’t seem to be improving. One... Read more →

In recent years, there’s been a resurgence of interest in placebos. Not the kind that are used to minimize bias in clinical trials, but the kind that doctors knowingly give to patients. In a recent survey of more than 200 doctors practicing in academic medical centers, 45% reported that they had... Read more →