HIV and ID Observations

June 23rd, 2019

Advice to Incoming Subspecialty Fellows — Don’t Underestimate or Belittle Your Interns and Residents

Around a million years ago, early during the first year of my ID fellowship, a medical intern consulted me about an elderly patient with a urinary tract infection. Me:  Does she have a catheter? Intern: I don’t know. Me: Has she been admitted before with a UTI? Any cultures? Intern:  I think so — wait, I’m […]

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April 14th, 2019

Here’s One “Rule” of Medical Education That Needs Fixing — Or at Least a Little Context

Like any card-carrying ID doctor, I enjoy teaching about antibiotics. Give me a whiteboard (small group), or a PowerPoint set-up (lecture hall), and I’m off and running. Not surprisingly, an important theme of these talks revolves around avoiding antibiotic overuse. Over the years, I’ve collected a few egregious examples of how marketing distorts public perception of […]

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November 26th, 2017

Should Medical Students Bring Laptops to Lectures?

You can file this under, “Old man yells at cloud,” but here goes. Twice a year now for over a decade, I’ve been lecturing the senior medical students in a therapeutics and pharmacology course. It’s an elective, but it’s very popular — most of the class takes it. Not surprisingly, my topic is Treatment of HIV (duh) […]

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March 14th, 2017

Poll: Should We Allow 24-Hour Shifts Again For Interns?

Over on Boston’s NPR site, I wrote a piece about the decision by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) to allow 24 hour (or longer) work shifts again for interns. My goal in writing the piece was to relay what I experienced doing these long shifts way back when during my internship — the good […]

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January 8th, 2017

Poll: Should Medicine and Family Practice Residency Programs Have a Dedicated HIV Track?

A few medicine and family practice residency programs around the country have a dedicated track that focuses on HIV care. Though the programs naturally differ somewhat in structure — here are two examples from University of Washington and Yale — they generally involve placing the resident into an HIV clinic for their longitudinal outpatient experience. We don’t have […]

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February 12th, 2012

Impossible Curbside at Medical Grand Rounds

Scene:  Medical Grand Rounds, 5 minutes before the start. Lecture is on coronary artery disease, which may have a link to Infectious Disease even if it isn’t actually caused by Chlamydia pneumoniae or CMV after all. A well-regarded, experienced primary care physician (PCP) approaches. PCP: Hi Paul, I have quick question*. [*Curbsiders often use this exact phrase — and rarely does […]

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January 18th, 2012

ID Case Conference Discussant Types

We specialists in Infectious Diseases love case conferences — especially those where the case is presented as an “unknown”, and we try to figure out the diagnosis from the history. I suppose this isn’t very surprising, since ID cases in general are already among the most interesting in all of medicine. Those that are case-conference-worthy are […]

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