I’m sad. Gone is the novelty of having magic in my IPhone. For over a year, I was special. As a beta-tester, I could show you your heart rhythm on my IPhone. Today, the AliveCor IPhone ECG passed muster with the FDA. It gained clearance to be sold to medical providers. I first reported this […]
Category: Health Care
I hope my patients are satisfied. This is everything. Improving the lives of people is why doctors do what they do. How much we help our patients is the metric. It’s the peg we hang our self-esteem on. So yes, of course, patient satisfaction is really important. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea […]
If you read one article that explains where we are going in Medicine, read this one. Few procedures have been more entrenched in the dogma of Medical practice than mammograms. In our climate of political correctness and right-think, it would define heretical to suggest a procedure that detects breast cancer–an important killer of women–at an […]
I am pleased to publish a guest post from friend and colleague, Dr. William Dillon, an interventional cardiologist in Louisville Kentucky. (He can be followed on Twitter @wmdillon.) I offer his words in the hope that they will bolster awareness of heart disease and foster a spirit of cooperation among all Kentuckians. Bill and I […]
I’ve written two new posts at the end of this week. The first is on the state of heart rhythm medicine, or as we call it, electrophysiology. The editor of the TheHeart.org asked me to look at a recent series of state-of-the-art review papers published in the British journal, the Lancet. The last time the […]
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Thirty Dollars…Really?
I am riled up—almost to the point of being inflamed. I hate it when doctors get dragged through the mud. It’s a matter of pride. Doctors are my team. The latest kerfuffle centers on how much we should charge for return patient visits. The difference here is between moderate and moderately high visits–or about 30$. […]
With the permission of the editors at theHeart.org, a version of this post also appears on Trials and Fibrillations. I wasn’t going to write on this matter, but I changed my mind. You know the news: the US Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act. As a doctor in the mix, it seems appropriate to […]
Big news was released today in the treatment of heart attack. Please allow me a (slightly) wordy intro. —— I’m not normally an alarmist. I often vouch for the heart’s durability. The exception to this rule is heart attack. Heart attacks are…well…very serious. In this case, alarm is clearly a good thing. So is teamwork. […]
Cycling Wednesday has to be postponed this week. There is indeed a more pressing and relevant health matter that has come to light today. I am talking huge news; a story ripe with optimism and hope. Let me tell you about a possible paradigm-changing idea in the seemingly hopeless matter of controlling runaway healthcare costs—a […]
There are important medical studies, and then there are landmark studies–the kind of science that disrupts the entire medical community. The most recent game-changer was published yesterday (online) in the British equivalent of the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet. Well known surgeon and author, Dr Atul Gawande and colleagues published this important look-back […]
Did you know September is AFib awareness month? As a believer in education as the first, and best treatment of AF, I think it’s great to enhance the public knowledge of this highly-misunderstood disease. By all means… Tell people about AF’s risks: stroke and heart failure. Tell them that their fatigue, poor exercise tolerance and […]