From passion to burnout: When a doctor ’ s love hurts
If only I had managed Mrs. Smith’s blood pressure better, she wouldn’t have had that car accident. If I had made the case for a statin better, Mr. Wu would not have had the diverticulitis episode. These types of thoughts have been with me for all of my decades of practicing medicine. Somehow, I’m supposed
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From passion to burnout: When a doctor’s love hurts originally appeared in KevinMD.com. (Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog)
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - March 14, 2024 Category: General Medicine Authors: Mary Braun, MD Tags: Physician Primary Care Source Type: blogs
How to Focus on What You Can Control: 10 Tips for Success and Happiness
When life is overwhelming or you’re having a very stressful week then it can feel like you have no control.
Like you’re a small ship being tossed around on a violent and chaotic sea.
No fun for sure.
At these times I find it helpful to first just focus on breathing deeply and slowly. And to pay attention only to my breath going in and out for a minute or two.
This calms my body down and greatly slows my mind from spinning around in circles.
After that I try to refocus. On what I actually can control. On what I can do to improve upon a situation and move forward.
And in today’s post I’d like to share the tips and h...
Source: Practical Happiness and Awesomeness Advice That Works | The Positivity Blog - March 6, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Henrik Edberg Tags: Happiness Personal Development Success Source Type: blogs
Living with pain is social: The Chronic Pain Couple book review
Over the past year or so I’ve kept returning to ‘the social’ part of our multifactorial pain experience.* Pain can be extraordinarily isolating, and our current sociopolitical emphasis maintains a focus on ‘what the individual should do.’ In New Zealand, our accident compensation legislation is a no-fault, 24/7 everywhere, all-the-time innovation but it falls short in critical areas. One is the continued focus on ‘physical findings’ to validate a diagnosis (and to show that the resultant impact on an individual is entirely due to a personal injury caused by accident), and the other...
Source: HealthSkills Weblog - February 25, 2024 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: BronnieLennoxThompson Tags: Chronic pain Coping strategies Professional topics Health pain management Therapeutic approaches Source Type: blogs
An analysis of History Written on the Water
My most recent song is out now for streaming and download via BandCamp. I’ve already talked about how it came to be and alluded to the origins of the title in the engraving on young English poet John Keats’ headstone – Here Lies One Whose Name was writ in Water
With this song History Written on the Water I tried to weave a tapestry of imagery and metaphor, exploring themes of secrets, betrayal, faithlessness, loss, and the relentless passage of time.
Secrets and Betrayal: My lyrics refer to secrets, suggesting that there are hidden truths that have been concealed or obscured. Lines like “The secret...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - February 21, 2024 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Music Source Type: blogs
The difficult balance between evidence-based healthcare … and person-centred self-management
For decades I’ve been an advocate for evidence-based healthcare because the alternative is ’eminence-based healthcare’ (for healthcare, read ‘medicine’ in the original!). Eminence-based healthcare is based on opinion and leverages power based on a hierarchy from within biomedicine (read this for more!). EBHC appealed because in clinical practice I heard the stories of people living with chronic pain who had experienced treatment after treatment of often invasive and typically unhelpful therapies, and EBHC offered a sifting mechanism to filter out the useless from the useful.
Where has EBHC...
Source: HealthSkills Weblog - February 18, 2024 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: BronnieLennoxThompson Tags: Chronic pain Clinical reasoning Coping strategies Pain conditions Professional topics Research Science in practice pain management Therapeutic approaches Source Type: blogs
Circling back to supported self-management
I’ve been writing a bit about supported self-management over the last few months. Partly because it’s topical given that medications and exercise offer very small reductions in pain and disability, and people do have lives outside of swallowing a pill and doing 3×10 reps! And partly because it is what we end up doing. It is the bulk of what people living with pain use to have lives.
Self-management refers to a broad range of strategies people with pain use in their daily lives to help them live well. I’m aware of the multiple definitions that exist for self-management, and that the level of agreem...
Source: HealthSkills Weblog - February 11, 2024 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: BronnieLennoxThompson Tags: Chronic pain Coping strategies Pain conditions Professional topics Research Science in practice biopsychosocial Health self-management Source Type: blogs
A teenager involved in a motor vehicle collision with abnormal ECG
Written by Pendell MeyersA teenager was involved in a motor vehicle collision and presented to the Emergency Department via EMS altered and potentially critically ill. He was intubated for altered mental status. Chest trauma was suspected on initial exam. Here is his initial ECG around 1330:What do you think?The ECG shows sinus tachycardia with RBBB and LAFB, without clear additional superimposed signs of ischemia. It is very unlikely that a previously healthy teenager would have such disease of the conduction system, bringing up the possibility of blunt cardiac injury in this clinical setting.Trauma CTs showed a " mi...
Source: Dr. Smith's ECG Blog - February 6, 2024 Category: Cardiology Authors: Pendell Source Type: blogs
The Business Case for a Biosimilar Company to Bring a Copy of Levemir to Market
My readers may recall that in November 2023, I blogged that Novo Nordisk announced it plans to retire (stop making) its first " Lantus killer " known as Levemir (insulin detemir injection) in the U.S. in 2024 (catch my post at https://blog.sstrumello.com/2023/11/novo-nordisk-to-discontinue-levemir-in.html for more). At the time I learned of the announcement, I was on vacation in Amsterdam, so I just made a note of the development and blogged about it a few weeks later upon my return.Like other patients my age, I have endured the company ' s previous insulin " retirements " . Novo Nordisk ' s time-frame for withdr...
Source: Scott's Web Log - January 25, 2024 Category: Endocrinology Tags: 2024 Biosimilar Levemir Novo Nordisk PBM Source Type: blogs
The Future Of Cognitive Health: This Is How Digital Health Can Help
According to this study, digital healthcare technologies offer ways to manage and slow down the progression of conditions like dementia and mild cognitive impairment. However, choosing the right technology is difficult because there’s no comprehensive review that covers the various types of digital technology for cognitive impairment, including their effects and limitations.
The goal of the study was to identify different types of digital health technologies used for dementia and mild cognitive impairment and evaluate how the results are measured and aligned with their intended purposes.
A total of 13...
Source: The Medical Futurist - January 16, 2024 Category: Information Technology Authors: Andrea Koncz Tags: TMF cognitive health Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, January 8th 2024
This study examined whether the local injection of the supernatant of activated PRP (saPRP) into the salivary gland (SG) could help prevent aging-induced SG dysfunction and explored the mechanisms responsible for the protective effects on the SG hypofunction.
Human salivary gland epithelial cells (hSGEC) were treated with saPRP or PRP after senescence through irradiation. The significant proliferation of hSGEC was observed in saPRP treated group compared to irradiation only group and irradiation + PRP group. Cellular senescence, apoptosis, and inflammation were significantly reduced in the saPRP group.
Th...
Source: Fight Aging! - January 7, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Is Alternative Splicing a Meaningful Cause of Degenerative Aging, or Largely a Downstream Side-Effect?
A gene sequence consists of a mix of shorter sequences, only some of which are used to manufacture the protein encoded in that gene. Exon sequences are included and intron sequences are excluded. Nothing is ever quite that simple, of course, but changes in which exons and introns end up in a protein enable multiple proteins to be produced from a single gene sequence. Sometimes this is an accident, assome genes are prone to accidental production of truncated or extended proteins that are toxic. Sometimes this is an evolutionary reuse in which a gene produces several different vital proteins with quite different functions.
...
Source: Fight Aging! - January 3, 2024 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Where is AI in Medicine Going? Ask The Onion.
By MIKE MAGEE
One of the top ten headlines of all time created by the satirical geniuses at The Onion was published 25 years ago this December. It read, “God Answers Prayers Of Paralyzed Little Boy. ‘No,’ Says God.”
The first paragraph of that column introduced us to Timmy Yu, an optimistic 7-year old, who despite the failures of the health system had held on to his “precious dream.” As the article explained, “From the bottom of his heart, he has hoped against hope that God would someday hear his prayer to walk again. Though many thought Timmy’s heavenly plea would never be answered, his dream finally...
Source: The Health Care Blog - December 6, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech AI Cris Ross John Halamka Mayo Clinic Mike Magee Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, November 13th 2023
This study investigated the correlation among muscle strength, working memory (WM), and cortical hemodynamics during the N-back task of memory performance, and further explored whether cortical hemodynamics during N-back task mediated the relationship between muscle strength and WM performance. We observed that muscle strength (particularly grip strength) predicted WM of older adults in this cross-sectional study, which validated our hypothesis and expanded on previous research findings. Studies demonstrated that grip strength predicted executive function decline in patients with mild cognitive impairment. Other cross-sect...
Source: Fight Aging! - November 12, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
An Evolutionary Model in Which Aging is Selected
The present consensus on the evolution of aging is that it is an inevitable side effect of natural selection - aging isn't selected for per se, it is a byproduct. Evolution favors reproduction earlier in life rather than later in life, particularly in environments with high mortality due to disease or predation, and thus there is little pressure to select for mutations that enhance long-term maintenance of the body and brain. Looking at the examples of biology around us, the outcome of this process is near always biological systems that fail over time, in which their structure is optimized for early life success at the cos...
Source: Fight Aging! - November 7, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Lung Chip Mimics Radiation Injury
Researchers at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University have developed a microfluidic chip that can recreate some of the features of radiation-induced lung injury. The lungs are very sensitive to radiation, and this can limit the application of radiotherapy to treat cancer. Accurately modeling radiation-induced lung injury could assist in developing new methods to prevent and treat the phenomenon, but it has been difficult to study this before the advent of advanced organ-on-a-chip models. The lung chip presented here contains human lung alveolar epithelial cells interfacing with lung capillary cells. The goal is to recrea...
Source: Medgadget - November 1, 2023 Category: Medical Devices Authors: Conn Hastings Tags: Oncology Radiation Oncology harvard wyssinstitute Source Type: blogs
