More pontification than a 15 minute office visit
Okay, as promised in yesterdays post, A Plan For Intelligent Health Care Reform Part 1, today’s post will basically just be a cut and paste of the letter I sent to Dr. Susman in response to his editorial entitled, “What if it’s cancer?”. If you havent read the editorial, please do so before reading my letter below, as things will make a bit more sense that way.
Continue reading ‘A Plan For Intelligent Health Care Reform Part 2′
Like most physicians, I’m usually a fairly busy fella. That’s one of the big reasons that this blog is typically only updated a couple times a week, rather than daily (or even more frequently), like a lot of blogs.
When I’m not in the clinic seeing patients, or trying to navigate through the massive bureaucracy associated with that, I try to read the latest professional journals to keep up with the latest research etc., so I can practice the best medicine I can.
This past weekend was one of those moments and I sat down to read the latest issue of the Journal of Family Practice. I often like to read the editorials and letters to sort of get a feel for how others in the profession are thinking.
So, what does that have to do with health care reform?
Well, the editorial in this latest Journal was of particular interest to me, and in it I think I see the makings of a plan for intelligent health care reform for the U.S.
Continue reading ‘A Plan For Intelligent Health Care Reform Part 1.’
So, as I’m surfing the web earlier today, I happened upon the “Health & Healing” discussion forum at www.craigslist.com, which is basically a typical fun Internet free for all.
Lots of folks with lots of opinions on there.
Anyway, I came across one post from a user going by the name of “dlwhiz” that expressed the following.
“I need to find natural cures for high blood pressure. Anyone have a cure, pills are not working, they make me sick.”
There was of course a plethora of answers from all sorts of folks. These anonymous Internet posters offered all sorts of advice basically ranging from “Quit being so lazy, get some exercise!” to “Use some different medicines” to “Try these great herbal remedies!” (I’m paraphrasing here to capture the general tone of most of the posts…these aren’t actual verbatim quotes)
Some of the answers I read were better than others, but most of them had one glaringly huge flaw, one which as a physician I saw immediately and which I think most physicians would similarly pick up on immediately.
What was this horrible flaw?
“Huh, this post title sounds different than what you emphasized in your last two weight-loss posts Dr. Sam?
I thought you said it was all about the calories.”
If that’s what you thought, go read those posts (The Hacker’s Diet and How to Lose Weight) again, a little more closely.
What I was emphasizing with those posts was that when it comes to losing weight (fat), it’s primarily all about the calories you consume.
I don’t want this message however to be misinterpreted as saying something along the lines of “As long as the calories are where they need to be, eat whatever the heck you want.”
That is most definately NOT my message.
If you remember in my How to lose weight post not too long ago, I gave you the zero dollar answer to that million dollar question.
That post ended up being about the equivalent length of a 13 page Microsoft Word document.
It seemed to me like an awful lot of writing to get across my basic message regarding fat loss, a message which is virtually overlooked in the myriad of diet books out there.
In a nutshell, my message is something along the lines of “While what you eat is important and you should definitely strive to make healthy foods the mainstay of your diet, and while getting plenty of exercise is important and you should definitely strive to get plenty of good exercise, when it comes to gaining or losing fat, all of that is trumped by the more important concept of how much you eat. When it comes to gaining or losing fat, it really is all about the calories you consume.”
Continue reading ‘More on How to lose weight. The Hacker’s Diet’
Sometimes I like to surf around news sites in other parts of the globe to get a better feel for what’s going on in other countries, as well as how the foreign press is presenting what’s going on here in the U.S.
In my opinion, access to folks in all the far flung places of the world is the greatest thing about the Internet.
Anyway, I was buzzing around the website for England’s The Daily Telegraph the other day, reading all the news that’s “Fit for Brits,” when I came across an interesting story about some breakthrough medical research being done at UCLA on Alzheimer’s Dementia.
Here’s the story titled UCLA drug aids Alzheimer’s patient ‘in minutes’. Please give it a read, and then come back here. It’ll only take a minute or two.
Okay, the following is a totally political rant. If you aren’t interested in a bunch of political ranting about socialized medicine, or the problems with Medicare funding, etc, (which, by the way is probably indicative of sanity and common sense on your part) then you should probably skip this post as it will most likely just irritate you. There is nothing in it that is informative about any particular medical topic or anything. It is not categorized under the “How to stay healthy” or “Silly Fun Stuff” categories for a reason. Disclaimer over with now. If you read further, don’t say you weren’t warned.
This will be a quick post, which I think is only fair considering the Epic War and Peace style dissertation I put the readers through with my last post on How to Lose Weight.
This is just a sort-of follow up to my post about Penumbra. If you remember, at the end of that post, I posed a couple of questions about potential other uses for this technology.
One of those other uses I wondered about was whether or not this treatment could be used for occlusive arterial conditions other than strokes, such as heart attacks for instance.
Well, it seems I’m not the only one who considered this sort of idea. A study published in today’s New England Journal of Medicine titled Thrombus Aspiration during Primary Percutaneous Coronary Intervention shows very promising results from a study in the Netherlands looking into just just this sort of thing.
As promised, I will keep this post short by avoiding going into a lot of details about this study. Hit the link above if you wish to get into the nuts and bolts of it.
In a nutshell however, the Dutch researchers compared doing a conventional stent placement in a heart attack victim vs first using a device (that sounds very much like the Penumbra device) to vacuum the clot out of the blocked coronary artery prior to placement of a stent.
They found that using the vacuum technique resulted in better perfusion and outcomes compared to conventional stent placement alone.
Today is Mardi Gras, and down in these parts (less than an hour from The Big Easy), Mardi Gras is a big deal.
For those not in the know, Mardi Gras is French for Fat Tuesday, and in these parts Fat is something we are quite familiar with!
The
Fat is something we have in abundance, not only around here, but pretty much nationwide. It’s not just a problem confined to the
Fat is like an annoying relative that just doesn’t want to go away. So let’s talk about this.
It seems like everywhere you look, there’s a new diet plan or secret weight loss pill or hypnotic technique or special tea from the
Getting rid of fat is a national obsession!
So, how do you do it???
That’s the million dollar question.
Dr. Sam is here to give you the zero dollar answer!
Hi folks,
This is just a quick note to point out a couple new links in the sidebar on the right. These are the Disease Index and Medication Index.
Each of these will take you to a page which will (eventually) have alphabetically listed links to other pages which will have information about particular disease conditions and medications.
As of this writing, I have a sample page in each one.
For the Disease Index page, there is a link to a page describing Giardiasis. This is information that is a cut and paste that came from the Centers for Disease Control website.
For the Medication Index page, there is a link to a page describing Amoxicillin. This is info that is a cut and paste that came from wikipedia.
Okay, this post has absolutely nothing to do with medicine, the healthcare system, medical practice or anything of the sort.
In a sort of tangential, really-making-a-stretch way however, it does have to do with staying healthy.
There’s an old saying that says “Laughter is the best medicine.” There’s even a good bit of empirical evidence to back that up. Here’s just one example.
Continue reading ‘Here’s the “One Semester of Spanish Love Song”’
