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…
Category: Conditions
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…
Dementia peels back the layers of our lives
When you begin to pay close attention, you notice how what used to be so easy becomes complicated. When you step back and watch things unfold in front of you, you realize that what once was enough is simply too much. Dementia peels back the layers of o…
Better guidelines that consider breast density are critical for women’s health
October 27th is the 30th anniversary of the Mammography Quality Standards Act (MQSA). Congress enacted this law to safeguard nationwide access to quality mammography to detect breast cancer in its earliest, most treatable stages. With this Act, the fed…
Doctors: Dig deeper when children can’t gain weight
The Oxford dictionary defines insidious as “proceeding in a gradual, subtle way but with harmful effects.” Most people associate this term with clever criminals. I am writing this to ask you to think about it in another way. Perhaps the gre…
Not listening carefully to a vulnerable patient can become a matter of life or death
Paula came to my office on a Monday afternoon, a few months after burying her husband. She and John had been inseparable. They were both my patients, so I knew John had spent the last six months battling lung cancer. They had been married forty-five ye…
Say “I love you” often and mean it
I normally start October off by changing my Facebook profile picture to a pink survivor ribbon and celebrating my breast cancer survivorship, but this October was different. I slept on October 1st because I had spent 48 hours at Gulf Coast Medical Cent…
My daughter and COVID: a tale of 3 doctors
It was the best of medical encounters; it was the worst of medical encounters. But it is indeed a story of how two physicians viewed the same situation very differently, and how one brought trauma to a young patient, and one (two) brought healing to th…
Why body type standards are wrong in measuring health
When you visit your doctor for your regular check-up, just like every human being, your body and health are judged by three main scientific standards to determine if you are healthy and “normal.” Standard 1 is the Standard Scientific Human …
