Claire Elise Boucher, 31, known professionally as Grimes, is a Canadian singer, songwriter, record producer, and visual artist. Her music incorporates elements of varied styles, including dream pop, R&B, electronic music, and hip hop. Since 2018, B…
Category: Conditions
The importance of patient education before surgery
A guest column by the American Society of Anesthesiologists, exclusive to KevinMD.com. For years, research and common belief have supported the concept that patient education alters patient behavior and improves patient outcomes. For instance, lifestyl…
Are the concerns about consumer genetic tests overblown?
When the Human Genome Project began in 1990, bioethicists feared that giving people the results of genetic tests would do them a lot more harm than good. Experts feared that individuals who received genetic information about their future health status …
Think of diagnostic excellence as playing smooth jazz
When we think about clinical reasoning, most talks focus on diagnostic errors and the reasons for those errors. The legacy of Kahneman and Tversky focuses on errors and the many named mistakes we make. We focus on avoiding errors, but their work and to…
The calm before the hospital
I’m in the back of an ambulance rig driving 110 miles an hour down the highway with the lights and sirens blaring. The knuckles of my right hand are crushed every four minutes as my patient has contractions. She cries only a bit. She’s sixteen and …
UpToDate? Information my cardiologists didn’t have.
I’ve always felt lucky and relieved when a cardiologist told me I seemed to be fine despite my heart condition. My condition, referred to as congenital, complete AV block, is estimated to affect between 1 in 15,000 to 22,000 live-born infants. Th…
A critical discussion is needed about planned death
“Planned death.” When you put it like that, this can only mean one of two things: suicide or murder. For most of us in medicine, the very idea of “planned death” seems safely outside our purview. After all, the bulk of medicine is concerned with stavin…
Paltering: When the truth is used to deceive
One evening in the clinic’s bullpen provider office, a colleague of mine wondered aloud how to respond to a difficult question a patient asked via patient portal message. A physician within earshot responded, “Just because someone asks you a question d…
A physician’s role in enlisting help to prevent suicide
A young man’s life is over too soon. He had been seen more than four times by more than ten different physicians and in four different clinical settings in the two weeks leading up to his death. Each time he was accompanied by a concerned loved o…
The suffocation of social isolation
Literature surrounding the effects of social isolation and loneliness for older adults is no longer lacking. Studies and articles outlining the dreadful consequences of these epidemics have even pierced large media outlets like Time magazine, where the…
