Family Medicine Notes

The new version of Medlogs.com - The News Aggregator for Medical Topics is now oficially live.  This entry will serve as an FAQ for the new version of the site.

• What's a medical weblog?
  A weblog is ... uh .. well, let's look it up in the wikipedia:  Definition: Weblog
  
  So now you know what a weblog is.  What's a medical weblog?  It's a weblog with a focus on medicine.  Some medical weblogs are by physicians .. some by people with a certain disease or condition .. some by healthcare technology workers, pharmacists, EMTs, nurses, medical students, residents .. you get the idea.
  
  A key component of personal weblogs we've chosen for inculsion in Medlogs.com is that they are not devoted to selling something.  Sure .. some of the weblogs have amazon ads or google ads on them, but the primary purpose of the site is not to generate revenue or sell somthing that generates revenue.  If you notice that one of the sites we include IS doing this, please let us know by using the contact form on the main page.
  
  
• What is the history of medical weblogs?  The first medical weblog was David Theige's MedEdnews.  Inspired by Dave winer's Scripting News, David was an avid weblogger, and made many wonderful contributions to medical education with this resource.  From The Internet Archive, one can see that David's very early work - called "an Educator's Journal" - goes back to December 3, 1998.  Alas, David seems to have lost interest in blogging, as MedEdNews hasn't been updated since 2001.  
  
  Also inspired by Winer, Jacob Reider's weblog (ok .. that's me .. but I sound more important in the 3rd person, don't I?) was first published in its current form on November 14, 1999.  I think that this makes it the second (and longest running) medical weblog, but I'd be happy to be corrected!
  
  The sites generally followed Winer's style - serving as a method of sharing useful information found on the web. 
  
  With the maturing tools, weblogs took off - as did medical weblogs.  Steve Hoffman wrote the first (that I know of) non-physician medical weblog; Sydney Smith, and Dr Bob were early arrivals who remain some of the most popular webloggers .. and then (predictably) .. on came the next generation with a vengance.  In fact, I'm surprised that it took so long for the medical students and residents to catch on, but I think that by a few months from now the "trainee" weblogs will outnumber the attending physicians. 
  
  
• How does medlogs.com work?
  With an RSS or Atom feed, Any weblog post is available in a format that other computers can read.  So medlogs.com asks your weblog if it has any new posts.  We do this every 30 minutes right now.  Someday soon, we'll proably accept a "ping" from your weblog so that we don't have to ask your weblog if you have a new post .. it will just tell us.  Once we get this worked out on our end, we'll tell you how to do it on your end.  Like most things weblog, It's easy. 
  Medlogs.com reads all of these feeds, then organizes them in reverse chronological order.  So the newest posts are on top. 
  
  
• How are medical weblogs arranged? 
  We have several categories.  If you Think we've arranged them incorrectly, or if you're thinking one is in the wrong place, please let us know by using the contact form.
  
  
• Why isn't my weblog in medlogs.com?
  There are usually two reasons why we don't have you in here.
  
  
  
  • We don't know about your weblog.  Please let us know and we'll add you.
    
  • You don't have an RSS or Atom feed.  You need one for medlogs to read your weblog.  Please read the documentation for your blogging software.  It's usually a matter of turning it on. 

That's it for now.  I'll update this post as time permits.  If you have additional questions that you think I should put in the FAQ, please let me know.

Posted by Jacob Reider, MD at 09:46 PM | Permalink

A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure mentions a Medical Economics article about jobs in primary care, and how Internists are (in some markets) in greater demand than family physicians. Hospital systems greater interest in Internists"... is partly a byproduct of employers' current focus on recruiting specialists" according to one of the recruiters quoted in the MedEc article.

Well .. we family physicians can be a bit .. uh .. thin-skinned about this sort of stuff, so please forgive me if I seem a bit negative about the post for a few reasons:

I am disheartened that rather few internists are attracted to primary care. 

I am disheartened that some recruiters and "hospital systems" are drawn to Internists rather than family physicians due to a perception that Internists drive more specialty referrals. Business is business, I suppose. So if the goal of a hospital system is to drive referrals .. and increase utilization of highly reimbursed services (such as surgery), then I suppose these concepts are right on target and we all should nod our heads in agreement.

Yet I wonder if this all misses the point. Why are we providing healthcare? Is the primary goal is to earn money .. and healthcare is the market? (Just like selling cars or baseball hats or computers) .. I sure hope not. As a profession, we do what we do because we want to deliver a valuable service to the world.

Yes - we want/need to be reimbursed - or we couldn't sustain the service. But reimbursement isn't the primary goal.  And if we consider the goals (implied, perhaps) of family physicians - I would suggest that they coincide with the healthcare needs of a community better than most other physicians.

Yet employers of physicians are sadly more interested in the financial picture than the healthcare needs of a community.

• They need to build demand for their service by hiring an Internist rather than a Family Physician. Wow.

Let's change a few words and see how similar that is to:

• "General Motors needed to build demand for their cars by killing off public transportation.

Yeh .. I'm streching the analogy a bit .. but .. you get the point .. is healthcare about "increasing market segment" or about "meeting a community's healthcare needs?" I argue that the two are inherently at odds. Physician supply and recruiting remarkably DOES change healthcare. Yet these "market force" decisions will hurt us far more than they will help us in the long run. We need a system where the skills of physicians trained and recruited will meet the healthcare needs of a community - not the fiscal needs of a hospital or healthcare entitiy.

Posted by Jacob Reider, MD at 12:39 AM | Permalink

From BMJ this week:

Epidural analgesia using low concentration infusions of bupivacaine is unlikely to increase the risk of caesarean section but may increase the risk of instrumental vaginal delivery. Although women receiving epidural analgesia had a longer second stage of labour, they had better pain relief.

My partner delivered a baby this week and struggled with 2nd stage so much that she ended up cutting an episiotomy and applying a vacuum and a consequence was a 4th degree tear.  Last month, I cut the 2nd episiotomy of my lifetime and we had to fix a 3rd degree tear (one of only a handful I've been involved with).  Common theme?  Epidural analgesia. 

I struggle with this often.  On one hand .. epidurals are wonderful adjuncts to the care that we can provide to women in labor.  The expoerience can be transformed from a lengthy, horrible experience to uncomfortable and tolerable.  Yes, yes .. I'll never know.  I will never have a baby and so .. my perspective is inherently different from those who have HAD the experience.  My life with back pain has certainly made me more sensitive to my patients with back pain .. and perhaps I would not be so hesitant to embrace universal epidurals if I had really experience the pains of labor.

Yet here we are.  Epidurals can enhance the likelihood of instrumental delivery and therefore complications.  Like most things in medicine .. there is not an easy answer here.  We need to make careful, thoughtful decisions. 

Posted by Jacob Reider, MD at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Discovered today on medlogs: This is very funny (and accurate too!)

Posted by Jacob Reider, MD at 02:04 AM | Permalink

An unusally long day .. but productive .. which is much better than a short unproductive day.

1. The Medical School  graduation was today.  This is the view from the stage .. where I was sitting .. 3rd row.  Can't pick your nose when you are sitting on the stage.  I wore my suit and tie.  Was very well behaved and even got kinda wistful watching these new young physicians stepping into their careers.  The speaker was Joseph Goldstein, who gave a nice short talk on the changing face of medicine today.  His message:  Genes are the future of medicine.  I didn't know as many of the students in this class as I had others.  I'm not one for ceremony or tradition ... but this sort of event is meaningful to me: a recognition of four years of extremely hard work, and the true birthing of a herd of healers/helpers etc. 
   


2. Office hours tonight were uneventful and kinda fun.  We had a first year medical student shadowing me and it was refreshing to see the novelty of family medicine through her eyes.  We had two patients who were here with concerns about possible lyme disease.  the first turned out to be a "textbook" case of pityriasis rosea, and the second was cellulitis of the butt.  We froze some skin tags, treated a UTI (and learned the reason for the term "honeymoon cystitis") and did a few well-child visits, mixed in with a few other new adult patients and a post-partum visit. 
   
   She was struck with how easily I brought up the part of the social hisotry that rhymes with "hex" .. and how easily I asked about same-sex relationships. 
   
   "Just be matter-of-fact" I said.
   
   Nothing is hard to talk about if you are not judgemental about it ... and I don't mean "don't act judgemental"  I really mean .. don't be judgemental. 
   
   This is easier for me with sexuality and other "challenging" topics .. and much harder for me with obesity and smoking and "bad habits" in general.
   


3. Staying here at the office late to take care of the large pile of papers and patient messages.  I got a bit behind on these last week .. and it takes a late night like this to really catch up.
   


4. e-MDs is giving away its medication database.  Hmm  I wonder if NAPCI should try to distribute it ... Multum will also give it away ... but not for commercial use.  The Multum Lexicon Guide, BTW, is a wonderful resource.  A must-read for anyine interested inhealther informatics.
   
   .. back to the charts ...

Posted by Jacob Reider, MD at 01:24 AM | Permalink

The beta version of the new Medical Weblogs site continues to evolve. I've been adding weblogs and trying to organize things, while Dave fixed the CSS and built a blogroll on the side. I'm working on a form to permit you to add feeds I don't have. I'll open it up for a few days .. so medbloggers will notice it and please do help me get some more blogs in there ...

Posted by Jacob Reider, MD at 01:54 AM | Permalink

Here's a sneak peek at the newest iteration of the medlogs medical weblog aggregator. It sorts posts in order. So the most recently updated welbogs are at the top. Maybe this is incentive to keep active! We've also separated things a bit (still working on the categories .. comments and corrections requested) ... so resident blogs are separate from physician blogs which are separate from newsfeeds such as reuters and medscape, etc. Dave has, of course, helped enormously .. as I couldn't have done this myself. Required some re-writing of feedonfeeds , and a bit of php magic. More enhancements on the way .. and a bit of debugging before we move this over to the main medlogs url.

Posted by Jacob Reider, MD at 11:41 PM | Permalink

Well .. I don't wear a tie at work.  I did wear one in medical school .. and probably my first few months of residency .. but pretty rarely since.  I just don't like 'em.   Now there is a study that demonstrates that physicians' neckties harbor pathogens.  They don't wash ties as they do the rest of their clothing .. and the ties come into contact with patients frequently .. and physicians' hands too .. (re) contaminating the hands after washing:

neckties worn by doctors were eight times more likely to harbor pathogens than were those of hospital workers not normally in contact with patients, according to the results of a new study.

While working at New York Hospital in Queens, lead author Steven Nurkin, a medical student at the American-Technion Program at the Bruce Rappaport Facility of Medicine in Haifa, Israel, noticed that physicians' neckties often come into contact with patients or their bedding.

After examining a patient or conducting procedure, he told Reuters Health, "they would wash their hands, and then adjust their tie," perhaps recontaminating their hands.

So he and his colleagues swabbed 42 neckties worn by physicians who regularly saw patients and 10 neckties worn by security personnel. They then dabbed the swabs onto laboratory plates and identified the microorganisms that grew.

Twenty of the clinicians' neckties carried pathogens, including Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Aspergillus. In contrast, the tie of only one security guard carried a single pathogen, S. aureus.

Nurkin pointed out that neckties are encouraged because they are believed to project an aura of professionalism and increase patients' confidence, but they may not be cleaned as often as other articles of clothing.

Options to reduce the risk of disease transmission, he suggested, include switching to bow-ties or using tie tacks that hold ties to physicians' shirts. Doctors could also decontaminate ties with a "high quality detergent spray that wouldn't ruin the tie" or even use a "necktie condom."

Posted by Jacob Reider, MD at 08:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've finally updated the back-end that runs medlogs.  It's been re-built entirely .. with some help from Dave.  I had some trouble with the CSS ... and he got things fixed for me. 

Medlogs is now a much better medical weblog and news aggregator.  I'm going to break things up into categories.  Still haven't figured out a good way to get them sorted by date .. which is what I really want. 

Dave has done some great work with coldfusion and LDAP.  Not documented anywhere else .. so if you are a nerd looking for info on how to do coldfusion security with LDAP to Novell or Windows ... Dave's blog will show you how.

Posted by Jacob Reider, MD at 07:32 PM | Permalink

Wired News: My Left Arm for a Gmail Account. Lots of talk on the Internet about Gmail accounts. Google's version of webmail provides many features, but the two that have haused the most stir are the privacy issues (google's computers read your e-mail and place targeted text advertisements on the screen next to your message) and the size of the mailbox: 1 gigabyte.

I have a gmail account. Lucky me. I won't have to buy one on ebay. Got it from my brother.

a) I love the 1 gb of storage.
b) I don't care about the privacy issues. I have nothing in my e-mail that google's computers aren't welcome to read. E-mail is inherently insecure anyway.

The great features of gmail are the auto-threading, and the ease with which on can "get through" the e-mails. Auto-threading takes all e-mail conversations and groups them together. So if I get a message from mom .. and I reply .. and she replies back .. is all automatically grouped together as one "conversation" instead of three separate e-mails. E-mail processing is also very quick. It's easy to review messages, identify and handle spam, archive, or label a message. All very fast. The user interface is the best I've seen for a web-based e-mail client .. dispacing my previous favorite, oddpost.

Posted by Jacob Reider, MD at 03:34 PM | Permalink

Childless couple told to try sex

A clinic spokesman said: "When we asked them how often they had had sex, they looked blank, and said: "What do you mean?".
"We are not talking retarded people here, but a couple who were brought up in a religious environment who were simply unaware, after eight years of marriage, of the physical requirements necessary to procreate."

Posted by Jacob Reider, MD at 08:57 PM | Permalink

Russ points to this article in the Reno Gazette Journal: "Patients claim fibers sprout from lesions and parasites crawl under their skin. Most doctors tell them it's all in their heads"

The topic brings up a problem in medicine that we (oddly) find hard to acknowledge: we don't know everyting. I do have a few patients similar to the folks descibed in the article .. and I have a hard time knowing WHAT the problem is. Saying "I don't know" is often the best method. My problems escalate when a patient brings to me a hypothesis from another healthcare provider which is as reflexive and condescending as "it's in your head."

Consider Dr Harvey's statement in the Gazette article I link to above: “Without understanding the skin lesions fully, I’m treating patients with antibiotics and having clinical success. Something appears to have happened to their skin immunity.”

He's making a treatment decision in the absence of any rationale. Am I an arrogant physician because I wouldn't treat a problem with antibiotics unless I knew there was a clear rationale for that treatment? Dr Weil's talk at STFM yesterday touched on this a bit. He acknowledged that much of the "alternative medicine" that people are embracing is in fact garbage. We need to be thoughtful and evidence-based as we practice integrative medicine .. just as we do for "traditional" medicine. Yet there will be integrative methods without much evidence, just as there are traditional allopathic methods without much evidence. He suggests that the requirement for evidence of efficacy be dictated by the level of risk in any treatment.

Posted by Jacob Reider, MD at 10:50 AM | Permalink

Like many, I've responded to the change of movabletype from a shareware product to a commercial one. As a colleage suggested to me ... people gotta eat. I will not move to wordpress. Upgraded to MT 3.0 without too much trouble. It does seem more stable - though I lost my HTMLAREA WYSIWYG editing which I liked very much .. so will have to figure out how to reainstall that to MT3. The tempaltes have changed a bit so it may take some work to figure this out.

This morning's keynote speaker at the STFM conference was Andrew Weil. He gave a compelling talk on integrated medicine and I find myself agreeing with much of what he has to say. He appropriately described the obvious links between family medicine and integrative medicine - as we do see patients as the sum of a whole - rather than as a disease or diagnosis. The key is that we need to work the training of integrative medicine into our medical schools and residencies.

He told a compelling tale of Dr Laurence Craven (descibed in this pdf .. and some other places:

In the 1950s, a California physician named Lawrence Craven made a keen observation. For several years, Craven had been prescribing Aspergum, a chewable form of aspirin, as a pain reliever for patients who had undergone tonsillectomies. Craven noticed that these patients experienced an unusually high occurrence of bleeding problems. In a bold leap, Craven theorized that this apparent “side-effect” of Aspergum might have beneficial applications. Within the arteries supplying the heart, Craven reasoned, an increased bleeding tendency might prevent the formation of the clots believed to cause heart attacks. Though his hunch would prove prophetic, Craven’s data were far from conclusive, and he became little more than a footnote in the aspirin story. Craven’s reports on aspirin were uncontrolled clinical observations, which only reached relatively obscure regional medical periodicals. His data were not published in the prestigious journals of the established research community, where they might have sent other scientists scurrying onto the aspirin trail. Craven was a family doctor, not a trained researcher, and his studies did not employ the rigorous scientific methods necessary to test his intriguing hypothesis. For example, he eventually had thousands of patients chronically taking aspirin, but assembled no control group of patients not taking aspirin against which their cardiovascular disease rates could be compared. Craven also betrayed the sort of unbridled enthusiasm for his hypothesis that can sometimes serve to discredit even the most plausible theory. In one report, Craven said that he placed 8,000 patients on regular doses of aspirin and not one suffered a heart attack or stroke. This track record appeared too good to be true. There was a smattering of other reports from scientists who also theorized that aspirin might have beneficial effects on cardiovascular disease, but the exact biochemical basis for such an effect remained unclear.

Weil's point is that one fo our problems in medicine today is that physicians often consider the SOURCE of information before we consider the informationitself. Craven, a General Practitioner, was not considered to be authoritative - so it too the cardiologists another 30 years to "discover" the compelling benefits of aspirin in the prevention of cardiovascular disease.

My session on Medical Weblogs went well on Friday .. I'll post an update about that if I have a few minutes later today .. otherwise we'll get to that tonight .. ;-)

Posted by Jacob Reider, MD at 11:24 AM | Permalink

I'm in Toronto (home of the Blue Jays) for my annual pilgrimage to the STFM meeting.  Toronto is a nice city.  Reminds me of Seattle.  Family medicine educators from all over the world come to the meeting to share ideas, successes and frustrations.  Today was the awards luncheon and I was especially impressed with the acceptance speech of Ellen Beck who was recognized for the work she's done building medical student-run health clinics in San Diego and then creating a fellowship program to help others to create similar clinics in other cities.  The people who are involved in STFM are dedicated, caring, thoughtful .. and just plain nice people.  I'm not saying that other physicians or even other family physicians don't meet this description, but .. as a rule .. the people at STFM are the sort of characters I'd like my kids to be when they grow up ...

Posted by Jacob Reider, MD at 04:16 PM | Permalink

Posted by Jacob Reider, MD at 10:42 AM | Permalink

Posted by Jacob Reider, MD at 12:19 PM | Permalink

Posted by Jacob Reider, MD at 04:11 PM | Permalink

Academic Medicine Online -- Abstracts: Watkins and Kimberly 79 (5): 432

Internal medicine residents and faculty reported low levels of knowledge about physician-pharmaceutical industry relationships. Some consensus about educational components existed, but optimal educational formats remain uncertain. A six-hour curriculum to address this complex, emotionally charged topic was developed, implemented, and evaluated.

This study confirms what is (for some) self-evident:  marketing works ... and unless you really THINK about the marketing ... the real agenda will be overlooked.  

Posted by Jacob Reider, MD at 11:24 PM | Permalink