By Jennifer Ng, MD
Peer Reviewed
Beauty and suffering are often thought to be intertwined. It is hard to have your cake and eat it too. In the quest for beauty, women (and men) have subjected …
Category: Systems
Clinical Correlations
A Primer on CRP and Cardiovascular Risk
July 22, 2015
Cindy Fei, MD
Peer Reviewed
A 63-year-old woman with hypertension presents to your clinic for routine follow-up. She came across an online article regarding C-reactive protein and its purported link to heart disease, and she asks you whether she should be tested for …
Diagnostic Challenges in Latent Tuberculosis Infection: A Brief Review of Available Tests and their Appropriate Use
July 15, 2015
By: Miguel A. Saldivar, MD
Peer Reviewed
“Indeterminate.” Many clinicians have expressed frustration when reading this word on a Quantiferon-TB Gold test result. The obligate follow-up question is: what is the next best step? Repeat …
Neurologic Complications In Infective Endocarditis: To Anticoagulate Or Not To Anticoagulate
July 10, 2015
By Shannon Chiu, MD
Peer Reviewed
The annual incidence of infective endocarditis (IE) is estimated to be 3 to 9 cases per 100,000 persons in developed countries [1-2]. Neurologic complications are the most severe and …
Microbiome Blues in E
April 1, 2015
By M tanner
Many bacteria live in and on me—I’ve always known that. But when I learned that bacteria make up 90% of the cells in my body, it made me feel so sucio, so unclean.
I went through my day, …
Diabetic Foot Ulcers: Pathogenesis and Prevention
March 19, 2015
By Shilpa Mukunda, MD
Peer Reviewed
On my first day on inpatient medicine at the VA Hospital, Mr. P came in with an oozing foot ulcer. Mr. P, a 60-year-old man with a 30 …
Ethical Considerations in the Use of Cordons Sanitaires
February 19, 2015
By Rachel Kaplan Hoffmann, M.D., M.S.Ed., and Keith Hoffmann, J.D.
Peer Reviewed
On December 6, 2013, a two-year-old boy living in southeastern Guinea became the first victim of the latest …
Shifting Paradigms in Cancer: Vaccines
January 22, 2015
Joshua Horton
Peer Reviewed
We are not winning the war against cancer, if war is even an appropriate metaphor. When Richard Nixon signed the National Cancer Act into effect in 1971, many predicted that …