Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians. A 60-year-old man is evaluated for a 5-month history of exertional chest discomfort that improves with rest. His symptoms have progressively …
A wise professor of medicine always told me as a young physician, “Eighty-year olds are to be revered and not messed with.” This is especially true for those 90 or older. Here in South Florida, there is always some senior citizen telling us today’s …
I am healthy, a mom of two boys, a wife, and an emergency medicine PA for the past 12 years. I don’t just say I’m healthy to say it, but I really am. I’ve never taken medications, until now. It’s New Year’s Eve, and I̵…
Most physicians recall the rigors of their residency training through a mixed lens. In prior generations, a single-duty shift could stretch to 36 or more consecutive hours, but the exhaustion was buoyed by the camaraderie of sleepless on-call nights in…
As the year winds down and must-pass year-end spending bills are completed — and with that, any chance of attaching and approving health care legislation — the special interests have won big, and consumers have lost big. Employers, unions, …
Ninety minutes before my Sunday night shift, my two-year-old, Titan, comes screaming up the stairs looking like a scene out of a slasher horror movie. His older sister sheepishly admitted to chasing him into the edge of a door frame. We created an ED b…
All of us are aware of what has been termed our “obesity epidemic.” The current prevalence of obesity among adults in the U.S. is around 40 percent, a dramatic increase over the past 50 years; it was about 15 percent in 1970. Rates are also increasing …
Year 2000. I’m sitting in a semi-fancy hotel ballroom near LAX along with several hundred slightly edgy emergency physicians. We’re all awaiting the start of our ABEM written re-certification examination. This was in the old-school days of live exams. …
There was outrage over the sudden rise in the price of the EpiPen. But the rise in many other pharmaceutical prices gets less attention but is just as concerning. It can be easy to forget issues like this until they affect us personally. My two encount…
I went to a bar last night — and I looked good: red coat, black dress, knee-high suede boots. I was feeling pretty good. I met my best friend at this bar — he lives elsewhere now — but this is his favorite spot in the world. Like No…
