The normal number of heartbeats per minute is a frequently asked question. People, especially medical people, like well-defined lows and highs. Parameters which can be assigned an ‘L’ or ‘H’ makes life easier. Competitive cyclists immerse themselves in a sea of information. In our quest for weekend glory, we intensely study oodles of data–minutia like […]
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Re…Assimilation
“You have 4 in the hospital to see.” Okay folks, it is time to bust back into the non-fiction world–the world of downgrades, military quagmires and not-so-blue seas. Ouch, this weekend was a rough one in which to jump back in. The fiction world was nice. There were oodles of “free” food, blue skies, even […]
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Summer Vacation
Okay folks, me, my family and about 6000 others will be cruising the Caribbean sea for the next seven days. See y’all in a week…or so. JMM
It happened. My 21-year old cycling teammate called to give me the “good” news. I made it. Clayton said I could now call myself a Top Doc. After practicing medicine for 15 years in the little known sub-sub-specialty of cardiac electrophysiology, this was my first Top Docs mention. Of course, I know this non-evidenced based […]
People who exercise outdoors face a new threat. It’s unrelenting. Consistent. Inescapable. Perhaps, even more dangerous than distracted or mean motorists. It’s the heat. Gosh, is it hot. If only I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say, “Doctor M, you aren’t riding in this heat; are you?†Well…Other than the fortunate […]
The patient greeted me with a smile that belied his horrible luck. He was my age, but looked far older. It was a slowly progressive neurological disorder that left his mind intact while his body stopped working. He was now imprisoned in a bed. Various family members fed him, changed his diaper, and freshened the […]
Today I would like to say thanks to a group of colleagues that too often go un-thanked. These would be my hospital-based internal medicine friends: hospitalists are what they are called. This idea came to me after reading Dr Robert Centor’s post on KevinMD. In his usual concise manner, he laments the lack of respect […]
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CW: 2011Tour notes…
This Wednesday, I am going to break away from medical topics. I will drop the biological vernacular, distancing myself from terms like sarcomeres, ion channels and inflammatory markers. Rather, I will pedal my thoughts on a bike racers’ biggest distraction each July: The Tour de France. Okay, that’s enough cycling-related action verbs. Sorry. But this […]
I recently came across a very important blog post on the use of the novel new blood-thinner, dabigatran (Pradaxa). Fellow Kentucky cardiologist, and frequent TheHeart.org contributor, Dr. Melissa Walton-Shirley wrote this very detailed case presentation involving a cantankerous non-compliant rural patient with AF (atrial fibrillation) that sustained a stroke while “taking†dabigatran. Dr. Walton-Shirley details […]
<Apologies in advance: this post is a (major) re-write of an old post.> Heart rhythm doctors are trained observers. We spend our days focusing on minute squiggles which are timed in milliseconds. It’s all a lot of observation. It’s only natural that one’s work skills might spill over to normal life. Plumbers are handy around […]
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Check the right box, Sam
His name is Sam, you know, like in “Sam I am.†He is 19 years old, a college sophomore-to-be, who sadly plans to study chemistry–more on that later. He looked happy and rested; he kept his cellphone in his locker the entire day; and while dressed in too large scrubs, a crooked surgical cap and […]