Shout Outs

Updated 3/2017--all links removed as many no longer active. 

Gina (@geeners), Code Blog: Tales of a Nurse, is this week’s host of Grand Rounds. You can read this week’s twitter edition here.

How’d we get to Volume 8 already?! I think hosting this Grand Rounds finally ties me up with GruntDoc, who has hosted 7 times. Grand Rounds is the weekly round-up of blog posts by medical bloggers.

Whereas in the past the host would post nearly every link they received, it appears that we are now moving towards more curated content. I said in my previous post that I wasn’t going to institute a theme, but I was definitely more drawn to the personal-story type posts. Thanks to everyone that submitted! ……..

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Dr Rob is finally back blogging! His recent Musings Post explains: Plugging Back In.

This post is to announce two things:

1. I am back blogging again.


2. I am not blogging on this blog. I have a new blog called More Musings (of a Distractible Kind).

I also have a new project, Llamaricks, which is a blog that will hopefully draw audience participation. It’s a place for poetry; poetry by me and poetry submitted by my readers (assuming I have any). Hopefully there are people talented and/or shameless enough to submit their prose to me on that site.

OK, so I am already being untruthful. I really had three announcements. ……..

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There’s a nice discussion going on over at doc2doc: Poll: Should doctors self prescribe? Various opinions. Here are a few:

Probably antibiotics for infections would be ok, and something like Voltaren for artritis, or celebrex, but no controlled substances, this is where the water gets muddied.

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Doctors should not self prescribe nor under any obligation prescribe any medication for a family member or friend without their own "clinical consent" in regard to the medical condition in question.

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Generally doctors should not prescribe for themselves and any narcotic prescribing for self or family is a definite No. There is a saying that 'the doctor who treats himself has a fool for a patient' ….

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Then there’s this via @skepticscalpel: “Why internists shouldn’t operate MT @hhask @writeo After-hours surgery resulted in woman's death http://bit.ly/AA2DHL”

The link is to an article in The Oregonian by Nick Budnick: Oregon Medical Board sheds light on cosmetic surgery by Northeast Portland doctor that led to woman's death

For botching an after-hours cosmetic surgery that caused her friend's death, a Northeast Portland physician faces administrative charges and could lose her license.
Soraya Abbassian committed "gross or repeated" negligence while performing the Dec. 15, 2010 surgery, including administering what an autopsy found to be a fatal overdose of local anesthesia, according to a disciplinary complaint issued by the Oregon Medical Board on Thursday. ……….

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H/T to @scanman for the link to this letter written by John Steinbeck to his eldest son, Thom: Nothing good gets away

In November of 1958, John Steinbeck — the renowned author of, most notably, The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, and Of Mice and Men — received a letter from his eldest son, Thom, who was attending boarding school. In it, the teenager spoke of Susan, a young girl with whom he believed he had fallen in love.

Steinbeck replied the same day. His beautiful letter of advice can be enjoyed below. …..

Dear Thom:
We had your letter this morning. I will answer it from my point of view and of course Elaine will from hers.

First—if you are in love—that’s a good thing—that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.…………..

And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens—The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

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Jordan Grumet Interviews Himself on his blog In My Humble Opinion (twitter handle @jordangrumet)

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Q: Taken as a whole, what is your blog about? What are the major themes?
A: If you asked me this question a few years ago, I would have said that my blog is a love letter to my patients. As I grow wiser, I realize that it is more accurately a love letter to my father.

When my father (a prominent oncologist) died, I was seven years old. As silly as it sounds, I spent a great deal of my childhood and young adult years trying to forgive myself for his death. Even though I knew I wasn't responsible for his aneurysm, I struggled with issues of being worthy of love.

As I read my own writing, I'm struck by the parallels. I fight to be protect my patients and lead them through the dying process, much in the way I wish I could have done for my father. …………

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Via Jackie-ES blog post: Join Patternfish and HeartStrings in Supporting WomenHeart (photo credit). I purchased the pattern, now to finish the projects I have started so I can knit this beautiful scarf.

Patternfish also launched a monthly charitable support initiative starting this month where the Designer of the Month picks a favorite charity and to which Patternfish will make a contribution. And I am the first to help kick off this initiative by choosing WomenHeart, the lifeblood organization devoted to improving the quality of life and the healthcare of women living with heart disease.

Patternfish will be donating $1.00 for each Thinking of You Scarf pattern sold during January to WomenHeart and I will match that dollar for dollar.

Shout Outs

Updated 3/2017:  all links removed as many no longer active and it was easier than checking each one.

David, Health Business Blog, is the host for this week’s Grand Rounds.  You can read this week’s edition here.

When I first hosted Grand Rounds six years ago, the iPhone, iPad and Twitter didn’t exist, and Facebook was not yet available to the general public. Barack Obama had not appeared on the scene and there was no discussion of the Affordable Care Act. Yet a lot of the topics in that edition would be familiar to today’s reader including firearms, RomneyCare, patient safety and Google. Two blogs (InsureBlog and Clinical Cases) that were featured in that early edition are featured here, too.. ……..

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Yesterday,  NPR ran this  article by Carrie Feibel:  Heart With No Beat Offers Hope Of New Lease On Life  (photo credit)

The search for the perfect artificial heart seems never-ending. After decades of trial and error, surgeons remain stymied in their quest for a machine that does not wear out, break down or cause clots and infections.

But Dr. Billy Cohn and Dr. Bud Frazier at the Texas Heart Institute say they have developed a machine that could avoid all that with simple whirling rotors — which means people may soon get a heart that has no beat.   ……….

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Clink Shrink, Shrink Rap, offers a thoughtful post on involuntary treatment:  Are We Not Thugs?  (read the discussion in the comments)

The voice at the other end of the line was angry and accusatory: "You didn't even talk to me! You never knew my son! You didn't talk to any of us!"
I explained to her that since she had never even met the defendant, there was no way she could have any information that would be relevant to the accused's state of mind at the time of the crime. The victim and the defendant were total strangers and there was no apparent reason for the killing, which made the crime even more tragic. Her son was dead in a random incident, in a crime that was unquestionably motivated only by the defendant's untreated psychiatric symptoms.    …….

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Dr Val, Better Health, is now hosting a radio show called, "Healthy Vision with Dr. Val Jones."  It is currently available here on iTunes.  The show has three segments (one about the importance of regular eye exams, one about contact lens care, and one about UV protection for eyes). It's available as a full show (20 minutes) and as individual segments.

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This essay (or article) from Stefany Anne Goldberg, The Smart Set, was in my local paper this past Sunday.  As that source is subscription only, I found it elsewhere to share with you.  The essay is Can You See Me Now? Welcome to Deaf-World

The 19th-century poet Laura Redden Searing, who happened to be Deaf, wrote a story about a lonely bird with crippled wings who comes upon the Realm of the Singing.    …..

What Deaf people have realized about themselves in the last century is that being Deaf opens up a new mode of experience. And ASL is the language of that experience. Deaf people were creating their own world. But it was a world they would have to defend.

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The newly published The People of the Eye sets out to define the Deaf-World and to fight for it. Where Deaf activists have spent decades arguing that deafness is not a defect but a character trait — a benefit even — The People of the Eye goes a step further. It asserts that Deaf is an ethnicity.  …….

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A few responses to the NY Times article by Karen S. Sibert:  Don’t Quit This Day Job

@medrants:  Medrants: Women in medicine - different strokes for different folks
@palmd: From the Underground NYT: Women are ruining medicine

I've written before about many of the challenges faced by women in medicine.  As more and more women enter medicine, there is a cultural shift struggling to be born.  ……….

As a society and a profession, we have to decide to take the role of women seriously. If we demean women's role in our profession, we may be more likely to demean our female patients and family members.

Richard L. Reece, MD (Medinnovation):  Health Reform, Women Physicians, and the Doctor Shortage
@scutmonkey:  Psychology Today:  The Mommy Wars, Medical Edition

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Leah, Free Motion Quilting, is one of the quilting blogs I follow.  She was recently listed as one of Quilter's Home Top 55!

Whoo Hoo! I was listed in the top 55 blogs by Quilter's Home Magazine!
Click here to read the magazine article and check out all the different blogs listed

This is crazy cool because one of the sort of kick butt moments of my life was when my Dad picked up a Quilter's Home magazine 2 years ago that had a similar blog and website list.

So is Barbara Brackman’s Material Culture blog.

From the Bottom of My Heart

Updated 3/2017-- all links removed as many are no longer active and it was easier than checking each one.

Listening to NPR Saturday morning, I caught part of Scott Simon interview of brothers Stephen Amidon and Thomas Amidon, M.D. discusses their book The Sublime Engine: A Biography of the Human Heart.    The interview touched on the story of the human heart in science/medicine, history, and culture.

It turns out that the classic red heart symbol we see almost everywhere around Valentine's Day doesn't look much like a real human heart at all.

"Of all the theories about where that symbol comes from, my favorite is that it is a representation of a sixth century B.C. aphrodisiac from northern Africa," says Stephen Amidon,….. "And I kind of like that history because it sort of suggests that early on, people sort of understood the connection between love and the heart."

Words and how we use them were the focus of Dr. Pauline Chen interview by WIHI host Madge Kaplan this past Thursday, February 10th (H/T Paul Levy):  A Legible Prescription for Health 

On this edition of WIHI, Dr. Chen wants to spend some time talking about language, especially the words doctors use with one another when describing patients; the unintended barriers created the more doctors and nurses don protective, infection-protecting garb; the mounting weight of patient satisfaction surveys; and more.

Back to the NPR interview on the sublime engine: the human heart.  The authors do not feel that as our advances in surgical techniques become commonplace, that the heart will lose any of its cultural and metaphorical significance.

"One of the things that surprised me during the course of writing this book was how durable the heart's metaphorical power has been — not just in the past 50 years in the great explosion of cardiology, but in the past 500 years since the great anatomists of the Renaissance began opening up bodies and began looking at the physical heart," he says.

Even as all this was happening, the heart has retained its metaphorical power.

"So perhaps there will be a day when we no longer touch our chest and kind of nod, and people understand we're talking about qualities that can't be explained by medicine — we're talking about courage or devotion or inspiration," he says. "You can have a situation where someone receives an artificial heart, and afterward goes to their surgeon and says, 'I thank you for this from the bottom of my heart.' This will make complete sense to us."

On this Valentine’s Day, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for spending part of your day with me. 

Heart in Hand Quilt – WIP

Updated 3/2017-- all links removed as many are no longer active and it was easier than checking each one.

This quilt won’t be done in time for Valentine’s Day as I just started it yesterday. It is inspired by this scarf featured on Street Anatomy. I cropped a screen shot, brushed in the heart (suggested by the arterial formation), and then printed it out on a sheet of Colorfast fabric.

There is a long tradition of heart in hand quilt blocks. When searching for the meaning of the symbolism I found several – charity, friendship, compassion.

These photos were taken after I finished the piecing and basting of the quilt. I now have to do the quilting. It will be approx 18 in X 23 in when finished.

Here is a close up of the center which is approx 5 in X 11 in.