When I finished my training, I was taught that the vast majority of dementia was Alzheimer’s disease, with occasional cases of multi-infarct dementia as well as odd syndromes such as Kreutzfeld-Jacob disease and genetic, traumatic, toxic and tumo…
Category: Conditions
Everything you ever wanted to know about croup
Imagine this scenario. Your two-year-old son has had a runny nose for a day or two and an occasional cough, but seemed no worse to you that everyone else in his preschool class. Two hours after you put him to bed you hear him coughing, only this cough …
How technology removes the pain point from diabetes management
There is a wealth of information about your health circulating in your blood. For people with diabetes, accessing that information can be a matter of life or death. For nearly 30 years, the prevailing technology for checking the blood sugars of someone…
MKSAP: 42-year-old man with thrombophilia
Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians. A 42-year-old man arrives for follow-up consultation. Three months ago he developed a proximal right leg deep venous thrombosis following a s…
MKSAP: 64-year-old man seen after an intraoperative liver biopsy
Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians. A 64-year-old man is evaluated in follow-up after recent abnormal findings on intraoperative liver biopsy. Two days ago he underwent right co…
The carefully crafted way of how health misinformation spreads
Effective clickbait doesn’t just happen. It’s carefully crafted. Take this wildly misleading article from CNN: Not exercising worse for your health than smoking, diabetes, and heart disease, study reveals. It’s one example — among many generated daily …
PSA-based screening for prostate cancer: Interpreting the changing guidelines
Comparing the 2018 U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommendation statement on prostate cancer screening in the October 15th issue of American Family Physician with its previous recommendation, the first question family physicians ought to…
A CT scan for kidney cancer? It may depend on where you live.
About one in fifty people reading this essay will be diagnosed with kidney cancer at some time in their life. In fact, one out of one people writing this essay has already been diagnosed with kidney cancer. (I had a small tumor removed from my left kid…
We need more behavioral health treatment in primary care
I don’t know how many times a patient has told me, “I was in therapy once, and it didn’t help.” My response is always: “That’s like saying ‘I saw a movie once and I didn’t like it’.” That usually breaks the ice just a little. In primary car…
Why it’s important to determine who’s truly penicillin-allergic
A true allergic reaction is one of the most terrifying events in medicine. A child or adult who is highly allergic to bee stings or peanuts, for instance, can die within minutes without a life-saving epinephrine injection. But one of the most commonly …
