She was the most important person in my life. My mom. The woman whose hands had held mine Before I understood the meaning of holding on, Whose voice was woven into the fabric of my childhood, Whose ...

A patient with a urinary tract infection calls at 9 p.m. and gets told to call back in the morning. Frustrated patients default to the emergency room instead. Tod Stillson is a family physician, ...

Six days. $20,000 in legal fees. One advance directive (living will) applied too soon. A 60-year-old man suffered complications after cardiac catheterization, developing acute kidney injury from the ...

Like most physicians, I have earned a great many continuing medical education credits in rooms where I learned very little. A slide deck, a speaker reading the slides aloud, a ten-question quiz at the ...

Your patients can see everything you post. Tali Lando was posting funny videos from her office while two of her young patients lay in the hospital struggling to recover, and it left her torn. She is a ...

A patient can leave a medical appointment with an explanation, a printed instruction sheet, and a question that has not occurred to them yet. The question may arrive while arranging a ride, talking to ...

A normal creatinine result can be reassuring. But for someone with diabetes, high blood pressure, or another risk factor for kidney disease, it may answer only part of the question. Creatinine helps ...

Only 4 in 10 caregivers say a doctor asked how the patient prefers to communicate. The patients who cannot answer often have the most to report. Chris Ross is a speech-language pathologist and school ...

The lab says the potassium is critically low. You walk in, and the patient looks completely fine. Duane Penshorn is an emergency physician and author. This episode is based on his article “Automation ...

It was in late spring of 1964, just a day after graduating from high school, that a diminutive farm girl packed her belongings and bade farewell to the life she had known in the Smoky Mountains of ...

More than 16 million Americans are estimated to have a diagnosis of dry eye disease. And the number of symptomatic patients living without a diagnosis is thought to be almost double. As a health care ...

We know when a patient’s laboratory values have improved. We know when the infection has cleared, the fracture has been repaired, or the heart failure has stabilized. But before declaring treatment ...