Episodes

"A resurgent CDC is necessary to recapture the vitality of U.S. medical science. A scientific researcher alone cannot do this work. This will also require heavy managerial work and restructuring and charting a different course altogether. CDC will...

"I’m a small-time doc in a small town, and I work at a small hospital in the Midwest, and I’m proud of it. The huge university hospitals (like Cleveland Clinic) get all the glory (especially in society and in the press), but small hospitals like...

"This last mile of the COVID pandemic—Omicron or not—is a painstaking one-on-one endeavor. As is most of primary care. Sadly, we now have to deal with political epidemiology as much as emotional and clinical epidemiology. We’ll sit with each of...

"Medical-legal consulting is a great way to use your medical training in a non-clinical field that helps people. I started this field 14 years ago and have trained over 1,600 physicians to be medical-legal consultants. Most physicians do medical-legal...

"Instead of trying to earn a spot on a talk show to help a person dealing with costly treatments for illness, perhaps it is best to lobby policymakers to pass legislation that impacts big numbers of patients dealing with the high costs of treatment,...

"In the ongoing saga of the pandemic, there is the debate whether to wear a mask or not. These are physical masks that temporarily hide our face, but we all wear another type of mask, a metaphorical mask. These are the masks we put on to present who...

"As a clinician who has received two Pfizer doses and a booster without any side effects, I wholeheartedly embrace vaccination to solve this pressing public health crisis. The key is for policymakers to identify the best tool for the job (i.e.,...

"At the beginning of my time as a CMIO, I needed to remain clinical to build camaraderie with my colleagues. This proved essential as the health system was going through a transition to a new EMR. The medical staff needed to know that every decision I...

"Patients die. This is a tragic truism in the world of medicine. Usually, the patients who die are elderly. Patients die from diabetes and kidney disease, or from alcohol abuse and liver failure, or from heavy smoking and lung disease. Or patients die...

"The U.S. health care industry has large challenges that can be overcome if we remember why our systems and services exist. We are here to help patients, and we must obtain the needed staffing capacity to drive throughput so patients can receive the...

"Absolutely, there are times when you need to be face-to-face with your patient. Yet looking at the broader picture, COVID-19 has shown us that in many instances, we can perform at an optimal level while remote. In my experience, I’m often able to...

"Gastroenterology clinics in rural areas have the unique opportunity to innovate the field by working with local community organizations and farms. Patients and physicians develop a deeper understanding of the root cause for chronic disease,...

"In the end, the patient-physician relationship is crucial to overall decision-making for any plan of care, treatment, or surgery. There are many variations in the reviewed studies in health care literature as to the cost-effectiveness of second...

"The more I spoke with individuals who had experienced a shared crossing event, the more I also noticed repeating patterns. A woman in West Virginia and a woman in Australia with deeply similar experiences around the loss of a baby. A grown daughter...

"As individual patients, we often don’t think about these costs. In my Instagram poll, nearly everyone taking Descovy reported receiving the drug effectively for free, largely due to Gilead’s copay coupons. However, as with anything in life,...

Emergency physician and financial planner Noah Kaufman gives a general cryptocurrency market update. He discusses the state of Bitcoin and the impact of fiscal tightening by the Federal Reserve and also comments on Paul Krugman's recent New York Times...

"When I came into the business world, I saw a huge spectrum of ethics and am still shocked at how there aren’t any standards. Why must one be in a professional career only to have some guidelines and/or rules to follow? I don’t currently have...

"Lifestyle medicine’s foundational pillars include a specialized look into diet, physical activity, sleep, stress, mood, substance use, and relationships. Creating a patient-centered plan of care based on these areas are proven successful in...

"Ultimately, patients need doctors to help them be healthy, and need their doctors to be healthy to help them! Unless interventions are done now, our health care system risks a downward spiral. While the pandemic has brought increased levels of stress...

"Anyone can win at poker when dealt a royal flush. But what can you do when the cards you are dealt don’t appear winning at all? My answer: Make the best of what you have. Recently I learned of a colleague who sustained a broken back in an accident....

"Taking stock of all these experiences, I feel like I have no answers. They lead me to a space of unrest and dissatisfaction for not having a pill that would instantly drop 10 kilos, cure hep E, curb food craving or resolve a heartache. But I feel...

"Inaccurate patient records aren’t just an inconvenience. They’re a risk. The EHR might speak for the patient when they cannot speak for themselves, and if it’s wrong, it’s a serious liability. In lieu of any system-wide improvements to EHRs,...

"The reality of the last two years is that almost all of us have experienced some mental health disorder symptoms, and that mental and physical health are equally important components of overall health. We call these subclinical symptoms, or symptoms...

"A hundred years ago, women lived one year longer than men, but now they live five years longer than men. And things are getting worse. Currently, the lifespan of men in the U.S. is declining due to alcohol, opioids, and suicide. These trends need to...