As a pediatrician, I am asked by worried parents about what they should give their child with a fever, Motrin (ibuprofen) or Tylenol (acetaminophen) to bring down the temperature daily. This question always requires more than a one-word response to the…
Studies show that when people know what palliative care is, they want it. Marketing genius Seth Godin talks about offering services that are “remarkable” — so good that a person would cross the street to tell a friend. Palliative care has that kind of …
Sequels generally disappoint. Jason couldn’t match the fear he generated in the original Friday the 13th. The sequel to the “Parachute,” a satirical piece canvassing PubMed for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) comparing parachutes to placebo, matche…
More than two-thirds of Americans use social media, and 90 percent of adults in the U.S. have a cell phone. With these tools surrounding us, we must be more connected with one another than ever before. Right? It doesn’t feel like we are. At least, the …
Rudolf Virchow, a pioneering physician of the 1800s, once wrote that “politics is nothing but medicine on a large scale”. Over a century later, this nexus is as apparent as ever, and many doctors engage as practitioners of both. Twitter erupted this pa…
My wife and I once canoed across a glacial lake. There were twelve people in our 30-foot canoe. To reach the shore of the Mendenhall Glacier, we had to paddle two miles across a lake. All twelve of us had to paddle together to reach the shore. But what…
Apocryphal story from residency: On morning rounds in the critical care unit, the post-call resident starts to present a complicated patient admitted overnight with chest pain, and after the first bits of the history have been presented, the wise old c…
When it comes to communication in the hospital setting, I have seen many iterations. My favorite version was at the VA on the inpatient medicine unit. Every morning, we all met in the medicine team room to discuss patients on the floor. The team’s soci…
A guest column by the American College of Physicians, exclusive to KevinMD.com. The aim of medical education is not only to transfer scientific knowledge, but also impart the wisdom accumulated over the long history of medicine that equips us to apply …
For many months, artificial intelligence has been in my peripheral vision, just sitting there, ignored by me because it seemed too far in the future to be interesting now. And then, there were all these terms — Big Data, machine learning, data science …
