"Health & Medical News"

Down to his last few dollars, he spotted a newspaper ad: Milford, Kansas, population two thousand, was looking for a doctor. He and Minnie loaded up their flivver and arrived there on October 7, 1917. On the edge of town Brinkley stopped, and the car shivered into silence. Milford had lied to them. Its population wasn’t two thousand; it was two hundred, if it stood on a chair.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: unranked [?]

In the fall I rotated through the geriatrics ward. One of the attending physicians was an irritating woman whose idea of the Socratic method was pimping you with really vague questions, then acting like she had already thought of whatever answers you gave and that you were only telling her what she already knew. The other attending was a throwback to “the days of the giants,” when pneumococcal pneumonia was diagnosed by injecting sputum into mice and antibiotics for urinary tract infections were tested on agar plates. One morning, one of my interns presented a case to him of an elderly man who had been hospitalized with fever and a cough producing green sputum. “He has pneumonia,” she proclaimed confidently. “Take a look at this chest X-ray.” She pulled up a digital image on a computer screen showing a distinct pneumonic streak. The senior physician waved it off. “First tell me about your lung exam,” he said.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: unranked [?]

While the match is made by a computer, the decision whether someone actually gets on a list, and his medical urgency classification, is made by local transplant committees. At Columbia-Presbyterian, the adult transplant coordinating committee meets every Friday morning, chaired jointly by Yoshifumi Naka [MD, PhD], the transplant surgery program director and Donna Mancini [MD], a professor of medicine and director of the Center for Advanced Cardiac Care, who oversees transplant cardiology. There are usually about 30 people around the table — transplant cardiologists, social workers, psychiatrists, infection specialists, neurologists, surgeons, transplant nurses and others. Most of the cardiologists are from Mancini’s section, but very occasionally an outside cardiologist may attend as well, to help advocate a listing for one of his patients.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: unranked [?]

On a spring afternoon several years ago, Evan McKinley was hiking in the woods near Halifax, Nova Scotia, when a pain in his chest stopped him in his tracks. McKinley was a [Canadian] forest ranger in his early 40s, trim and extremely fit, with straw-blond hair and chiseled features. He had had a growing discomfort in his chest for the past few days, but nothing as severe as this. He wasn’t sweating or lightheaded, and didn’t feel feverish. But each time he took a breath, the pain got worse. McKinley slowly made his way back through the woods to the shed that housed his office. He sat and waited for the pain to pass, but it didn’t. As a forest ranger, he was used to muscle aches from scaling a steep rocky trail or jogging with a loaded pack on his back. But this was different, and he decided he should see a doctor immediately.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: unranked [?]