What should a heart doctor talk about on the this wear-red-for-women’s-heart-disease day? (It’s sunny out this Friday afternoon, so I am keeping it brief.) Promoting women’s heart health is important. Even though pink made the bigger news this week, heart disease kills far more women than breast cancer. Wait, that’s a terrible line of reasoning; […]
Let’s get off cell biology and back to something I really know. Atrial fibrillation, AF ablation and blood thinners. There was an important study published today in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology concerning the use of the new blood thinner, dabigatran (Pradaxa), around the time of AF ablation. A very concise overview, […]
Yesterday, I wrote about how stem cells might some day offer heart patients a mulligan. But even the most optimistic optimist would agree that realizing this dream is futuristic. For now, and the near future, we have to play them where they lie. In real-life, do-overs for heart attacks and strokes happen only on rare […]
…it would be a good thing! There are oodles of old rules in Cardiology. The provocateur in me loves it when dogma falls. Niftier even, is when one can invoke the biology of newts to explain how yet another certainty was proven wrong. As it turns out, those funny-looking mud-lovers possess a property that may […]
You know what befuddles me? Clinical nutrition confuses the heck out of me. The adjective ‘clinical’ implies that I’m talking about the medical aspects, the science of nutrition, not the basics. Of course, you know what constitutes basic nutrition. Everyone does. The simple rules seem well…so simple. (With JMM-to-patient commentary in italics.) Consume fewer calories. […]
Enjoy this 3-minute video with your coffee: Mr Danny Hart’s winning run at the Downhill World Championships. (Note the announcer–one wonders how many espressos the guy had? One of the comments on Youtube, noted a potentially new medical term: a “Hart attack.” JMM
Rambling a little this afternoon. On perspective and gratitude. On the drive to work, I heard NPR’s piece on Dr Paul Farmer’s (Partners in Health) efforts to build a modern-day teaching hospital in Haiti. Having recently read Mountains beyond Mountains and then hearing this story made me think about the disease that I treat, atrial […]
Imagine. Imagine the inflammation that the endurance-athletic community would have been spared? If only Pheidippides had lived. I mean, what was the rush? The battle had already been won. Athenians could have waited another few hours (or days) for the good word on the battle of Marathon. It’s not like someone was tweeting in 490 […]
Hey All, Thanks to the hard work of Dr Val Jones (@drVal), this week’s Grand Rounds is being hosted on USA Today Your Health. Along with my post on Medical Blogging. there are 55 posts from many of the web’s best medical bloggers. It will lake a while to work through this sea of great […]
How do doctors decide on treatments? How do you decide? And yes, you should decide! What inputs go into making this important decision? Let me make it simple. Basically, there are only four. (As they say in the Hamburg EP lab…â€It’s easy.â€) First, since I am an older doctor, I’ll start with… Risks: In deciding […]
The Practice of Medicine inspires I feel compelled to write because I am passionate about my work. For most doctors, Medicine plays out like a roller coaster—ups, downs and plenty of whooshes. It’s rarely dull. Doctor writers care about their work; we want it to be better. We need to tell the stories, and hope […]