Author's posts
The success of Australian firearms regulation: What it could mean for children
An article in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2018 noted the sad milestone that firearms were causing 15% of all deaths in children and adolescents. Somewhat encouraging, a later study showed states with stricter firearm laws correlated with low…
Do protocols and pathways improve care?
As I’ve written before, I have to confess I’ve never been a huge fan of pathways and protocols. They often struck me as rigid and insensitive to the nuances of differences between patients. There are also times when they are just absurd whe…
Why are so many community hospitals transferring children to larger facilities?
A recent edition of Pediatrics has some disturbing research: “Trends in Capability of Hospitals to Provide Definitive Acute Care for Children: 2008 to 2016.” What the paper really does is document what many of us who work in referral hospitals have not…
Everyone needs rudimentary statistical training
Every day we get bombarded in the news with health statistics. Coffee causes cancer! Coffee cures cancer! And so on. Many of these are meant to grab headlines (and, these days, web page clicks), and the articles they accompany are often very poor at te…
What to do with the extremely defensive doctor
Let’s talk about the doctor who is excessively defensive. I divide this kind of communication blocker into two varieties: physician personality and physician mode of practice. The physician with a defensive personality is one who interprets quest…
The doctor who avoids answering your questions
Most of us are, to some degree, procrastinators. We avoid or postpone doing unpleasant things. In this sense, physicians who are avoiders are no different from anyone else. For a doctor, however, avoiding things often leads to poor, or at least less th…
What to do if your doctor is excessively egotistical
Egotism is a common trait among doctors, although most of us keep it under adequate control when dealing with patients. The ideal doctor-parent encounter has been described as a collaboration among equals, each of which brings expertise to the exchange…
The progressive increase in adult obesity is more complicated than we think
All of us are aware of what has been termed our “obesity epidemic.” The current prevalence of obesity among adults in the U.S. is around 40 percent, a dramatic increase over the past 50 years; it was about 15 percent in 1970. Rates are also increasing …
Is it more dangerous for your baby to be born at home?
The debate over the safety of giving birth at home, both for the mother and for the infant, has continued for years. I’ve written about the issue myself. From time immemorial until about 75 years ago or so, most babies were born at home. Now it’s aroun…
Increasing strictness of gun laws correlates with fewer children killed by guns
Between 2011 and 2015 there were over 21,000 children killed by guns. This recent study in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, further analyzes the question; it compares pediatric firearm fatality rates among the various stat…
