Category: Conditions

A careless misdiagnosis. A death. A lawsuit.

They loved long walks through the woods in California. They were sweethearts in high school through college. If they wanted to take a break from their walks, the dogs would gang up on them and insist on continuing. The trees, the skies, the quiet, the …

Protecting children from bad medical care

Unfortunately, at least from where I sit, suboptimal medical care seems to abound. And every encounter of my family members with the health care behemoth is an opportunity for them to become a recipient of it. When it comes to shielding them, I have ha…

By failing to discuss strangulation, we are failing our patients

Six seconds is the amount of time it would have taken for him to render me unconscious. Shortly thereafter, I might have lost my life. One month before I finally found the strength to leave an abusive ex-partner, he rushed at me with unexpected force d…

Managing key risk factors may lower your dementia risk

Close to 6 million adults in the U.S. are currently living with Alzheimer’s disease or a related form of dementia, according to CDC data. And that number will grow as the U.S. population ages. The number of people with Alzheimer’s and relat…

Why HIV and COVID-19 vaccine screening should go together

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans got accustomed to regularly answering a series of questions about our risk of exposure to COVID and our possible symptoms. For more than two years, our country remained laser-focused on this protection, demonstra…

Letting grief make you stronger

Grief is powerful and can break your heart for the rest of your life, or you can learn from it and become stronger. Losing a loved one is something that everyone will go through, but not all come out as survivors in the end. It’s part of life, bu…

It’s time for a reckoning in pain medicine

More than a million Americans have died since the late 1990s from drug overdoses, with the vast majority dying from an opioid overdose. This trend started with the heavy marketing of opioids to physicians as nonaddictive and effective. The number of de…

Be a shining example for your weight loss patients

How can you be an example of what’s possible for your patients on their weight loss journey? I got this question recently in a doctor’s social media group I like. The answer is simpler than you think. As their doctor, you aspire to perfecti…

Why does it take 10 years to diagnose this common disease?

Every day, patients with the same story walk into my office. Young people in their teens, 20s or 30s are exasperated and seeking help for constant painful boils that drain the pus in underarms, groin, and around breasts — a condition called hidradeniti…

Advice from a pediatrician during the viral surge

As is the case throughout the country, central Ohio is in the midst of a viral surge with an unusually high number of ill children for this time of the year, leading to long delays in our urgent cares and emergency departments, in our primary care offi…