I made a list of six things that needed to happen if I was going to turn my life around. I was frustrated with my then-current work-life situation, and kept falling into the same bad patterns but couldn't figure out how to break the cycle. After constantly feeling like I didn't have time to exercise or eat right because I was too tired or spent, one day I literally looked in the mirror and had an epiphany...
Where Retroflexions has been, and where we are going...and a new article about farts! Welcome 2018!
We all knew John was going to fail. His plan was barely a plan, and was not realistic. He needed to make major lifestyle changes and lacked the knowledge to design a proper plan. He could have benefited from...
When someone has a real disease and tells me they're not a pill person, I can't help but wonder what exactly does that mean? Someone with dangerously high blood pressure, who is not a pill person will soon become a stroke person.
It just so happens that this interaction occurred during a particularly low point of my fellowship, and I blurted out "Do you have...
Now, I don't want to offend anyone with this post (it's already too late), but it seems these days that the only qualification that one needs to don a long white coat is to work in some patient care area of a hospital. The long white coat used to be the way patients, families, and other hospital medical staff could instantly tell who was a full-fledged attending physician. In fact, the emphasis on the white coat starts on the first day of medical school with something aptly called a "white coat ceremony."
What is the deal with anal sex and fecal incontinence?
In every hospital I have ever worked in, from medical school to present day, there is a noise pollution problem of epic proportions. Every medical device seems to emit at least three different types of beeps, each of them being more loud and annoying than the next.
Overtesting and over treatment are big problems in modern medicine. It sometimes goes like this: Have a minor complaint? It's probably nothing, but we should do an exhaustive workup because there is a 0.00001% chance it could be cancer, maybe. However,
Most people know that they cannot eat anything after midnight if they have a procedure scheduled the next day. However, what about when a procedure is not actually scheduled? Sometimes a little bit of common sense and a little foresight needs to be applied to avoid having a procedure delayed an entire day because of the NPO rules. Here are two common situations that I encounter (without exaggeration) several times per week:
I call this the "Attribution Sign" and once you notice this is happening it is important to remain objective about the history and not fall into the trap that the patient is (inadvertently) setting for you. That is, don't place too much weight on the patient's attribution and don't let it skew your judgement.
Of the cancers that both men and women can get, colon cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in the Unites States. Colonoscopy, when performed by an expert with an adequate adenoma detection rate, has been shown to reduce the risk of developing colorectal cancer. For most people, routine screening colonoscopy is recommended starting at … Read more
Make sure to never miss a post by subscribing!