Reliable, Trustworthy Reporting, Capturing The Heartbeat Of Our Community
Reliable, Trustworthy Reporting, Capturing The Heartbeat Of Our Community
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Over the course of my career, I have performed countless pelvic exams on women of all ages from all walks of life. There are two common patient behaviors that I have observed. First, most women leave their socks on. This could be the fact that most stirrups are cold, but it also seems like one feels just a little less exposed when wearing at least one item of their own clothing. The other thing that almost every woman does in the exam room is hide her undergarments under her pile of clothes. It...
Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, was first listed as a medical diagnosis in 1980. However, it has been recognized and called by many different names throughout history. The first recorded description of PTSD is in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which dates back to 2100 B.C. In The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer wrote about Trojan War soldiers exhibiting symptoms of PTSD. Shakespeare described a character in King Henry IV who suffered from post-traumatic nightmares. During the Civil War, the terms...
I enjoy visiting with my colleagues who are medical specialists. We dive in and explore the depths of a particular condition. However, there is something to say about the breadth of knowledge that a family medicine physician is expected to have. Your family doctor can run through the alphabet of conditions from acne to the zika virus. A 2004 study in the “Annals of Family Medicine” found that a family medicine physician managed an average of 3.05 problems per clinic visit. For patients over 65...
The saying goes “time heals all wounds”, but what happens when a wound does not heal? Wounds go through many stages while healing and complications at any step can prolong the process. The first step is stopping the bleeding. For people who are taking blood thinners like aspirin or warfarin, it may take longer for the bleeding to stop or clot. The next step after the blood starts to clot is forming a scab. This happens when blood vessels around the wound narrow and platelets in the blood clump t...
When you watch a medical drama on television, the main characters are generally doctors, nurses and patients. We rarely learn about the many extras in the background. In an actual hospital, patients are cared for by their doctors and nurses, along with a large supporting cast and crew. Many of these people on stage and behind the scenes rarely get their name in lights. I would like to introduce them now. Before a patient arrives at the hospital, we often rely on emergency medical technicians...
Imagine a condition with symptoms that present differently in each person who has it and no currently-approved lab test can definitively confirm the diagnosis. Imagine that the symptoms can flare up and then mysteriously disappear, including fatigue, low-grade fevers, joint pain and mouth sores. All these symptoms overlap with multiple other conditions, further complicating a diagnosis. Imagine the best available method for diagnosing this ailment is a manual checklist of 11 criteria and, if...
Daylight savings time has just ended and now everyone has had the chance to "fall back" to standard time. While many people enjoy that extra hour of sleep that comes each fall, 63 percent of Americans say that they would support the elimination of seasonal time changes and there are some health issues to consider. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine also supports this stance due to the sleep disruption that occurs related to this biannual change. Our body has its own internal clock called...
When we think of Henry VIII, most of us envision an oversized man with multiple wives, a bitter personality and a propensity for beheading his enemies. A lesser-known fact is that he suffered with chronic leg sores the last twenty years of his life. Living in a time before antibiotics, anesthesia and proper wound care, this king endured excruciating ulcers with no cure available. Would history have been different if his sores could have been treated with today's advanced wound care? As a young...
The kidneys may be called the Rodney Dangerfield of the body, as they often "don't get no respect." The National Kidney Foundation estimates that one in three adult Americans are at risk for kidney disease, yet these organs are mostly ignored unless they develop stones or stop working. When healthy, kidneys work continuously at their main job of filtering blood to remove unwanted products and help produce urine. Kidneys clean approximately 200 liters of blood each day, removing up to two liters...
JILL KRUSE, D.O. I was sitting in my beach chair on vacation soaking up the sun when I overheard the couple next to me sounding concerned. They were throwing out lots of big medical terms but were very confused and said that they did not understand anything that they read on this MRI report. I turned to them, apologized for eavesdropping and introduced myself as a physician. I offered to "translate" what the radiologist report said and they gladly accepted. Their problem was not a lack of...
