Category: Conditions

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…

Understanding the backlash to gaming disorder

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently announced the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases will have a new code: gaming disorder. For those who eagerly await play-by-play updates to ICD codes, this may be old information. …

5 misconceptions about incontinence

Incontinence is hard to talk about — many women choose to suffer in silence, finding it too embarrassing to talk about it with friends, family or a doctor. The truth is urinary incontinence affects millions of women — you’re not alone and there are sev…

5 misconceptions about incontinence

Incontinence is hard to talk about — many women choose to suffer in silence, finding it too embarrassing to talk about it with friends, family or a doctor. The truth is urinary incontinence affects millions of women — you’re not alone and there are sev…

Questions about the measles outbreak you were afraid to ask

There have been over 1,000 cases of measles in the first half of 2019–the most since 1992, according to the CDC. For comparison, 2018 had 372 cases. With New York at the center of the outbreak, it’s reasonable to have questions–from how to know if you’…

How to raise a resilient child

An excerpt from the Mayo Clinic Guide to Raising a Healthy Child. If you look it up in the dictionary, you might see the term resilience explained as having the ability to bounce or spring back into shape after being compressed, stretched or bent. Tree…

MKSAP: 38-year-old woman with fever and flank pain

Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians. A 38-year-old woman undergoes follow-up evaluation in the office. She was evaluated in the emergency department 3 nights ago with fever and f…

Don’t lower the voting age, says this neurosurgeon

On several occasions, most recently during a press conference in March 2019, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has advocated changing the voting age to 16. Pelosi told reporters that lowering the voting age would increase engagement in politics among y…