It's the Phenome and Not the Genome: Put Your Money on Mortal Flesh
Translation: use your eyes, take a good history, weight the patient and get a few simple blood tests, and you can predict risk far better than a panel of genetic tests.
Translation: use your eyes, take a good history, weight the patient and get a few simple blood tests, and you can predict risk far better than a panel of genetic tests.
For one who has an interest in the body as text, airports are treasure troves of information. It seems almost un-American to enjoy delays, and…
In 1996 a surgeon was operating on a rare malignant tumor when he accidentally cut himself. Some months later he developed an identical tumor at the…
I watched an extraordinary documentary last night, right on my computer. A Walk To Beautiful, set in Ethiopia, has special meaning for me because it…
Lets give ourselves a chance at precise diagnosis before we treat. That means good specimens, hand carried, examined by the people who care for the patient. Proxy wars never seem to work. Find the enemy and win the firefight is a good philosophy for infectious diseases as it is for war. Diagnosis matters.
The time of year has come when we interview final year medical students from across the country applying for internships. I experience deja vu when I…
But here's the rub: we can never know which cancer has been over-diagnosed at the time of diagnosis. We can only agree that it was over-diagnosis if the individual is never treated (and turns out to be fine) or dies of something else and the cancer turns out not to be important. Since we can't know ahead of time, we generally wind up treating everybody.
I am at the First Stanford Symposium on Bedside Medicine, and we have the world's leading experts on the diagnostic examination gathered here. It is…
What the President and our politicians should have known is that our personal health is the one arena of our life (the other being our love life) where reason and logic get thrown out of the window.
Looking across and seeing the twin towers standing, could anyone have predicted how the world would change? Or how magazines would fare over the next decade?
So seriously, does anyone believe that we doctors can own a hospital (or sleep center if you are a sleep specialist, or imaging center, or outpatient…
I attended a wonderful presentation a few days ago by Ajit Varki, a physician and scientist at the University of California San Diego and head of…
It is that time of the year when fourth year medical students are gearing up to send in their applications for internships. I confess, for the first…
In a previous post I had worried that "Comparative Effectiveness Research" was going to be the sexy new buzz word, the one a fresh generation of…
I had the pleasure of being in the East Wing of the White House on Wednesday, one of about 160 people in the audience as President Obama appeared on…
So I consider myself a dog person. Kind of. Had dogs when I was a kid, but my parents would never have dreamed of having them in the house. Then,…
President Obama's speech to the AMA was a model of reason, clarity and vision. It raises the question of why the AMA needed to be lectured about the…
The most famous medical painting in the world is probably Sir Luke Fildes' THE DOCTOR. Fildes was inspired by the physician who attended his first…
This month I am the attending physician overseeing an internal medicine team, one of four such teams that admit patients to my teaching hospital.…
A newsletter from our Stanford medical school library reminds me that fifteen years ago, if I wanted to get the latest scoop on a disease, I'd have…
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