Thoughts from #SGIM15 & #ProudtobeGIM

Today I leave the SGIM meeting and fly to Boston for the ACP meeting. Despite having 8 days of meetings and finishing my stint as Chair of the ACP Board of Regents, I could never miss the SGIM meeting. SGIM (the Society for General Internal Medicine) became my academic home in the early 1980s. At SGIM I found my peers and became convinced that academic GIM would become my career path. Each year at this meeting I become energized; I get new ideas and I see many, many friends. SGIM is rolling out a new campaign Proud to be GIM. This wonderful campaign echoes my personal feelings. I believe I was born a general internist, and was fortunate enough to find the field and SGIM at just the right time in my career. During the meeting I focused primarily on clinical vignettes. This focus fits with my personal obsession with diagnosis. While I saw a number of excellent posters and heard several excellent oral presentations the following observations currently dominate my thoughts: 1. Chikungunya fever is the latest “chic” diagnosis. Each year at this meeting a few diagnoses emerge as interesting and important new considerations. I had heard about chikungunya several years ago, and have read recent reports about this viral infection arriving in our hemisphere. Fortunately, it is usually self-limited, but it does cause severe joint symptoms. 2. Everyone is discovering staph lugdenensis. I wrote about this bacteria in 2010 on this blog, describing a patient. We subse...
Source: DB's Medical Rants - Category: Internal Medicine Authors: Tags: Medical Rants Source Type: blogs