HIV and ID Observations

December 16th, 2018

ID Doctors Are Lousy Golfers, and Time to Pick Your Favorite Cartoon Caption

Some might wonder how people who take care of patients, who deal with illness and suffering on a regular basis, can find humor in medicine. Alternatively, one could take the opposite perspective — with so much misery around all the time, how could we survive without humor? Clearly the folks at The BMJ are in the latter camp, […]

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December 12th, 2018

Two Weeks of Attending on the ID Consult Service, with One-A-Day ID Learning Units

For those of us who don’t do inpatient medicine all the time, the “blocks” doing inpatient Infectious Diseases consults are a stark reminder of just how complex and challenging the case material can be. Think about it — if a hospitalized patient has a straightforward ID problem, we are not getting involved. No one consults ID […]

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November 25th, 2018

Does Experiencing Childhood Illness Make Someone Stronger? How One Person Turned Adversity into Remarkable Success

Many people growing up with chronic illness become resilient. Whether it’s Crohn’s Disease, or cystic fibrosis, or diabetes, or the sequelae of an accident, or whatever condition they have, they impressively live their life just like the rest of us — occasionally regressing or slowing down only during a flare of the illness. But then there’s an […]

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November 18th, 2018

HIV and HCV Treatment, Shorter Antibiotic Courses, Malaria-Sniffing Dogs, and Other ID and HIV Reasons to Be Grateful, 2018 Edition

As noted here before, I’m a big fan of Thanksgiving, a great excuse to get together with family and friends, and to eat a gargantuan amount of food.* (*On this last point, non-U.S. citizens will wonder how this differs from any other time we “Americans” get together. Indeed, we are the Land of Giant Portions. Ever eat […]

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November 12th, 2018

Sharing Radiology Images Across EMRs Is Frustratingly Terrible — and It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way

In the United States, any person who has tried getting their own (or their patient’s) radiology images from another hospital or practice will find this brief anecdote painful: https://twitter.com/sarahkliff/status/1059518100821983233 Here are several obvious reasons why the CD-ROM — briefly the darling of large-data transfer — is a truly terrible way to share radiology images in 2018: They […]

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November 4th, 2018

Your Next ID Cartoon Caption Contest — Yearning for Your Submission

The nice people who write our hospital’s newsletter interviewed me recently about this blog, and we covered a whole lot of territory. How it got started … inspirations … popular posts … fax machines … why an ID doctor from Mexico asked me about my dog Louie. There was, however, a grave omission — nowhere in this […]

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October 28th, 2018

New Flu Drug Offers Convenience, Fast Activity, and a Novel Mechanism — at a Price

Last week, the FDA approved a new drug for treatment of influenza, baloxavir marboxil (Xofluza). The drug is indicated for treatment of symptomatic influenza in patients 12 years of age or older. As with existing treatments, it should be started within 48 hours of symptom onset. In a comparative clinical trial in otherwise healthy outpatients, baloxavir and oseltamivir […]

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October 21st, 2018

A Day in the Life of the Academic Assistant Professor of Medicine Who Wakes Up at 5:30 a.m. to Get Her Kids to School, Takes the Bus to Work, Answers Emails, Completes Online Required Modules, and Fills Out Disability Forms for Her Patients

(Inspired by a recent peculiar article about a Bay Area tech superstar.) Dr. Camilla Gormley is always on the move. From the moment her alarm wakes her at 5:30 a.m. to prepare breakfast and school lunches for her three kids, to the time 16-plus hours later when she can finally rest her head on her pillow, Dr. […]

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October 15th, 2018

Outpatient Antibiotic Prescribing Boosts Patient Satisfaction Scores, Rewarding Bad Medical Practice

A recent study confirms what every busy clinician already knows. Many patients seeking care for respiratory infections expect to receive an antibiotic. When they get one, they’re happier than if they don’t. Among 8437 patients seeking care for a respiratory tract infection in a direct-to-consumer telemedicine service, 66% received an antibiotic. The rate of prescriptions prescribed by […]

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October 8th, 2018

“Mini”-Really Rapid Review — IDWeek 2018, San Francisco

Once upon a time, the annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) wasn’t much of a research conference. It consisted mostly of review sessions on topics deemed worthy of an update or a refresher, led by noted experts in the field. They would cite the latest literature on endocarditis, or mycoplasma, or prosthetic […]

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