Most patients believe and trust a diagnosis and treatment plan their physician provides them. So why is a second opinion in medicine so important? The “practice of medicine” is a term used to imply a variety of diagnoses and treatments. Yes…
Category: surgery
Protein calorie malnutrition is devastating for patients [PODCAST]
“My practice consisted of patients who suffered from serious injuries and illnesses. Concerning the latter, a significant number had cancer, especially breast cancer. The issue all patient groups have in common to a certain degree is protein calo…
My patient and I were born on the same day. It took a tragedy to bring us back together.
It was a hot afternoon, but no dog day humidity yet. I was driving back from a satellite office when our nurse practitioner called. A patient with a condition we’d seen many times before, a brain hemorrhage, her consciousness waning. The CT scan showed…
War is really not all it’s cracked up to be
An excerpt from All Bleeding Stops. 42nd Surgical Hospital Phu Bai Republic of Vietnam December 1967 Private Ira Stein has so many wounds, has lost so much blood, that the corpsmen nearly bring him straight to Graves. Steve Benson can’t get a pressure….
The pain of doctoring and a call for change
Below are moments from my intern year of general surgery residency. They represent moments that occurred over three years ago, which I took home to my journal to process and work through. Back then, the moments left me speechless. And today, re-visitin…
Stories of surgery, clarity, and grace [PODCAST]
“My mother, bless her ninety-year-old heart, is slowing down. The things that made her happiest — getting to church, visiting friends, taking walks, and wandering the aisles in the grocery store —are increasingly difficult. She worries that her l…
Do you have any idea how beautiful you are on the inside?
Do you have any idea how beautiful you are? Well, OK; maybe for some it’s were. Before you got a little thick in the middle, smoked, or even just breathed city air for enough years, or drank a little, or did a few drugs, there was a time — …
Do you have any idea how beautiful you are on the inside?
Do you have any idea how beautiful you are? Well, OK; maybe for some it’s were. Before you got a little thick in the middle, smoked, or even just breathed city air for enough years, or drank a little, or did a few drugs, there was a time — …
Protein calorie malnutrition is devastating for patients
I am a former chief of surgery and a scientific entrepreneur. My practice consisted of patients who suffered from serious injuries and illnesses. Concerning the latter, a significant number had cancer, especially breast cancer. The issue all patient …
Ode to a little bile bag
Surgery to remove the gallbladder is a relatively late intervention. The first laparotomy was performed in 1807 in Danville, Kentucky, and surgeons like Billroth and Kocher, were removing thyroids and even parts of the esophagus as early as the 1870s;…
