By Grace Huang, MD
Peer Reviewed
Many of us became familiar with the Ebola virus after reading Richard Preston’s fictional thriller, The Hot Zone. However, in recent months, fiction has turned to reality in West Africa, as one of the largest reported outbreaks of the virus continues to spread, with 1,093 cases and 660 deaths to date across three, now possibly four, countries. As efforts continue to contain the virus as quickly as possible, we turn to a few other issues in medicine which, while…
By Ali Marisa Mendelson, MD
Peer Reviewed
It was late when I left the call room on my last day as an intern in the step-down unit, and I hesitated before entering the stairwell. I considered turning instead towards the elevators, which would take me swiftly down seventeen floors, a world away from the sickness and disease we had spent the day battling. Instead, I took a detour to say good-bye to a patient I had met earlier in the month. I felt somewhat embarrassed…
By Caroline A. Nelson, MD
Peer Reviewed
New legislation signed by Missouri Governor Jay Nixon has opened the door for medical school graduates to treat patients in underserved primary care settings without residency training or passing Step 3 of the United States Medical Licensing Examination. After 30 days of supervision by a collaborating physician, the law would permit these new “Assistant Physicians” to treat patients with only indirect supervision as far as 50 miles away. The Missouri State Medical Association helped draft the law to…
By Sagar S. Mungekar, MD
Peer Reviewed
It was around the 300s BCE when a sow must have had her snout near Mycobacterium intercellularae, an environmental saphrophyte that lives in soil and water. After some time, she—like many of her community—developed tubercles in her cervical lymph nodes. Aristotle noted that this happened to many domesticated animals such as pigs and oxen. Though this phenomenon was likely noted by many of the time, Aristotle’s is the first written record of it. Some time later, a physician…
By Jennifer Ng, MD
Peer Reviewed
Addiction, by definition, is a negative word. It implies the overindulging of something with a high or uncertain risk to benefit ratio, such as coffee. Yet recently, writer Markham Heid informed coffee addicts all over the world, “Drink Coffee, Lower Your Diabetes Risk” . To add to that, it’s not just coffee; tea and decaf can do it too, or so his article proclaims. Skeptical? Let’s review the evidence and judge for ourselves.
It turns out that this same…
By Kimberly Skrobarcek, MD
Peer Reviewed
As the world is seemingly captivated by German’s victory in overtime of the World Cup final game, more and more of our television commercials and advertisements seem to be caught up in the frenzy as well. One Hyundai commercial in particular highlights the emotional connection we feel with the joy of a victory, maybe even prompting the start of a family . With this in mind, we turn to an exciting new study that could prove very important in…
By Aditya K. Sreenivasan
Peer Reviewed
The Huffington Post recently publicized a large study on the health habits of doctors. The study, a survey done by Medscape with 31,399 participants, revealed that more than half of doctors take some form of dietary supplement. The most common form of supplement taken was a multivitamin . With the way doctors find themselves in constant discussions about “evidence based medicine” these days, we can assume that there are solid data showing that multivitamins are beneficial to long-term health.…
Vivian Hayashi MD, Robert Smith MD
The answer to the mystery quiz is rhabdomyolysis due to legionella pneumonia (LP). The presentation of the patient, namely severe rhabdomyolysis complicated by acute kidney injury, obscured the presence of a subtle retrocardiac density that is visible on the CXR (Image 2, asterisk). The upper axial image from an abdominal CT, obtained one day after the CXR, shows the extent of the LLL infiltrate (Image 3). The infiltrate is contained by the major fissure and is characterized by air…
