retired doc's thoughts

The Feb. 2, 2006 of the NEJM features a randomized trial regarding "tight" blood sugar control in intensive care patients.Physici...

The Jan-Feb issue of the ACP Observer in its "the Business of Medicine" section has a number of suggestions to improve the bottom ...

American Medical News (subscription required) quotes Dr. Mark McCleland as saying " there is a strong congressional interest in not doi...

FDA's Medwatch reported 3 serious cases of liver toxicity with Ketek (telithromycin).The patients were not on other medication and said...

A recent article in the Archives of Internal Medicine by Dr. D. Shefet et al who performed a systematic review and an editorial review of t...

Two medical bloggers have recently disagreed a bit regarding integrative medicine or alternative medicine. We speak of the art and the scien...

Singly or in combination it seems that whatever problem is identified,worried about or exaggerated, the proposed cure will be 1)IT-that is, ...

The Jan 16, 2005 issue of American Medical News (subscription required) features a frontpage article on what they describe as the new buzzwo...

An article in the Jan 18,2005 issue of JAMA reports on a randomized trial of watchful waiting versus surgical repair of "minimally sym...

The ASCOT trial which demonstrated that amlodipine plus perindopril was superior to a combination of atenolol and a thiazide in terms of red...

Upated guidelines for management of patients with dyspepsia have been published by the American College of Gastroenterology (AGA). The AGA ...

Civil libertarians-and even folks who are not that libertarian-are alarmed at the actions of public health officials in New York. Accordin...

The Jan. 11, 2006 issue of JAMA has an article (The Chistopher Study,vol..295,no.2,172-179) with a proposed system or algorithm for diagnos...

Randomized clinical trials enjoy the view from the top of the hierarchy of "truth seeking epidemiologic mechanisms". Medical stude...

A dictionary definition of quality is "a measure of excellence".I believe that when most people use the term outside of a technica...

A basic fact about pneumonia is that physicians recommend treatment without knowing the specific pathogen.This is because we have no reliabl...

Ataxia, confusion and opthalmoplegia, the classic triad of Wernicke's, that all the IM residents at Charity Hospital were aware of and h...

I previously posted about the notion of " disease mongering " . Ads are recently appearing alerting the public and/or the medica...

The Dec. 20, 2005 issue of the Annals of Internal medicine published an article evaluating various implementation strategies for pneumonia ...

One of the operational rules of the medical-quality "thought leaders" is that "variation is bad" and it must be mitigate...