Category: Medicine
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Trauma II
I’ve been absent, I apologize, but my last rotation in medical school has been a sub-internship in Trauma surgery. Aside from work, sleep, eating, and buying a house in Baltimore, blogging has necessarily suffered. I will say a few things though that should be a public service message on the TV. People need to wear…
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Rating your doctor online – is this a good idea?
I have just finished taking my last major exam of medical school – Step 2 of the boards (including Step 2 Clinical Skills, or CS, which costs 1200 bucks, requires you to travel to one of a few cities in the country hosting it, and is sealed by a EULA that forbids me from talking…
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Antidepressants, physical dependence, and semantics
Antidepressants are a very useful class of medications. With the introduction of the first modern antidepressant, fluoxetine (Prozac) in the U.S. in the late 1980’s, the pharmacologic treatment of depression has undergone a revolution (and an enduring controversy). Older classes of antidepressants were often effective, but came with a host of unpleasant toxicities—MAOIs can lead…
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Smackdown, please (yes, Egnor, I’m talking to you)
Arrogance. It’s always about arrogance. Arrogance is the Great Distractor in science. It is a half-a-dozen logical/rhetorical fallacies rolled into one—argumentum ad ignorantium, non sequitur, tu quoque, ad hominem, straw man (yes, that’s not six yet, but I gotta give myself some flexibility here). These fallacies aren’t just rhetorical toys to play with in the…
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What is an internist, and why should you care?
A (long) while back, I gave you a brief explanation of what an “internist” is. I later gave you a personal view of primary care medicine and some of the challenges involved in creating an infrastructure of primary care (only 2% of American medical grads are going into primary care). We also had a little…
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It’s back! Get ready for the flu
Yes, it’s that time of year again. Last year, I gave you weekly flu updates from the CDC and from my position on the front line. So far, it’s still quiet. I haven’t personally seen any cases yet, but I’m sure to soon enough. It’s not too late to get vaccinated. Wash your hands frequently.…
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Improving medical care—arrogant doctors are a distractor
(Tangentially related podcast here) Here’s the thing: all this talk about arrogance in medicine is a red herring. It’s distracting us from the real question that we should all be asking: how do we improve quality medical care? The personality of individual physicians is important, but not very, just as the medical mistakes of individuals…
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Choosing a medical specialty III – applying, interviewing and matching
Aside from taking 4th year medical school classes it’s also the time of year that medical students who plan to graduate in 2009 (like me) are applying to residency programs across the country. This is an interesting process and one that many people outside of medicine are unfamiliar with, and quite surprised by. For one,…
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Credulous medical reporting
Science and medicine reporting is hard. In this space we’ve dealt with some of the problems that arise when “generalist” reporters try to “do” science and medicine. And now, CNN has shut down its science unit. Given the increasing complexity of medical and scientific knowledge, this is very bad news. As a fine example of…
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H. influenzae—it ain’t the flu, but it’s still pretty cool
This was first posted at Science-Based Medicine on Monday, but I can’t seem to keep myself from cross-posting. –PalMD I’ve been thinking about an interesting organism lately, an organism that illustrates some basic principles in science-based medicine. The organism is called Haemophilus influenzae (H flu), a gram-negative bacterium discovered in the late 19th century. H…