You’ve probably seen it on the news – a rare, polio-like illness is causing cases of paralysis in children. Here’s the latest info, based on our best current knowledge from the CDC. Acute flaccid myelitis (AFM) is a sudden illness that causes weakness …
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…
“He’s having a senior moment.” That dismissive phrase seems harmless, but, in reality, it leads to devastating, debilitating disease. I firmly believe that a generation from now, people will not know the pain of watching a loved one slip into oblivion….
There is a man. He is in my house. I don’t know where he came from. But he just came into my house. And now he is living there. And I am afraid of him. I do not know who he is. There is a man in my house. I am so scared. I don’t […]
Teleneurology is the new and vastly expanding practice of neurology involving the use of technology and/or video chat to improve access to services. With an ever-increasing aging population there is and will continue to be a shortage of neurologists in the United States. Teleneurology has increased patient access to neurologists especially in rural areas but […]
A excerpt from A Mind Unraveled: A Memoir. Copyright © 2018 by Kurt Eichenwald. Published by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. I awoke in pain. Sometime during a seizure, I had fallen down the stairs outside of my bedroom and banged myself up. […]
Computed tomography, or CT scanning, is one of the most powerful diagnostic tools to emerge during my medical career. Just look at the detail in the brain images above, taken at 90-degree angles through the brain. And I was there at the beginning. I remember well when I was a medical student taking neurology, and […]
“Do your parents realize that he could die?” I had been summoned to the workspace of the ED physician who was trying to save my brother’s life. I remember noticing that he was short with thick brown hair and a crisp white coat which were both too tidy and incongruent with the message he was […]
Few things in primary care give patient and doctor mutual and instant gratification. It’s been a while since I reduced a “nursemaid’s elbow” or a spontaneous shoulder dislocation other than my own, or a finger dislocation, but those all count. I once wrote about curing deafness in a man with a movement disorder by flushing ear […]
In July, 2009, the family of Massachusetts teenager Yarushka Rivera went to their local Walgreens to pick up Topomax, an anti-seizure drug that had been keeping her epilepsy in check for years. Rivera had insurance coverage through MassHealth, the state’s Medicaid insurance program for low-income children, and never ran into obstacles obtaining this life-saving medication. […]
