By Nathan King
Faculty Reviewed
Doctors are known to be some of the worst patients, and from personal experience I predict that medical students are not too far behind. That’s why when I finally found the time to take a proactive step in maintaining my good health, the last thing I hoped to run into were barriers, but that’s exactly what I hit. To my surprise, it was not at the hands of insurance companies, overbooked doctors, or the general bureaucracy of the medical system; …
By Luke O’Donnell, MD
Peer reviewed
Once formidable diseases, pneumonia, bacteremia, and meningitis are all now considered “bread-and-butter” internal medicine. Streptococcus pneumoniae is one of the major pathogens in these processes, causing 500,000 cases of pneumonia, 50,000 cases of bacteremia, and 3,000 cases of bacterial meningitis in the United States annually, with case fatality rates of 5-7%, 20%, and 30%, respectively .
Efforts to vaccinate against this gram-positive diplococcus started in mining sites near Johannesburg, South Africa around the turn of the last century . …
By Matthew Shou Lun Lee, MD
Peer Reviewed
Clinical Questions
-How common are elevated cardiac enzymes during Wellens’ syndrome?
-Can the EKG changes in Wellens’ syndrome be found with other causes?
Background
This post represents a follow-up to the 2009 article in Clinical Correlations by Dr. Erin Ducharme .
Wellens’ syndrome refers to a distinctive combination of clinical and EKG findings in unstable angina associated with high-grade lesions of the left anterior descending artery (LAD) . Initially described in 1982, the criteria has undergone minor …
By David Kudlowitz, MD
Peer Reviewed
Neoplastic fever (aka tumor fever) is a challenging yet essential clinical diagnosis. In fevers of unknown origin, studies estimate that the incidence of neoplastic fever is anywhere from 7 to 31% . In the febrile patient with malignancy, tumor fever is the most common cause of non-infectious pyrexia (41%) . While leukemia, lymphoma, sarcoma, atrial myxoma, renal cell carcinoma, and liver metastases are the most common culprits, neoplastic fever has been reported in several other cancer types …
By Pritha Subramanyam
Peer Reviewed
Mrs. CS is a 66-year-old Indian female who presents for a cardiology follow-up. The patient has a history of mitral regurgitation secondary to rheumatic fever she experienced as a child. As a teenager, her condition was diagnosed when she frequently became short of breath while playing sports in school. She was in good health until 24 years ago, when an acute episode of dyspnea while climbing stairs sent her to the emergency room. Her native mitral valve was found to …
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 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 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. …
