HIV and ID Observations

April 15th, 2016

Mystifying Abbreviations on Daily Medical Rounds

I am currently attending on the inpatient medical service — always a treat, and a great learning experience for me each year. Aside from the refresher on inpatient general medicine — hey, no amount of repetition is too much when it comes to working up hyponatremia — I’m also fascinated by the steady proliferation of abbreviations and acronyms, bits […]

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April 2nd, 2016

You Too Can Have Fun with Academic Spam

Like most doctors who work at academic medical centers, I get a fair amount of “academic spam” — invitations to bogus meetings that take place in some exotic or at least warm place (China, Dubai, and Orlando are favorites), efforts to sell me monoclonal antibodies or, more recently, CRISPR-altered mice, and of course requests to contribute research papers or […]

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January 27th, 2016

Here’s an Idea: Justify Your Specialty’s (Low) Relative Salary Using Moral Superiority

In an otherwise excellent piece on recruitment to the ID field from the pages of Infectious Diseases News, comes this: But while inadequate compensation [for ID doctors] may hamper recruitment, it also could prove beneficial to some degree … Reduced salaries filter out the less-passionate applicants in favor of those who are more dedicated to their patients and […]

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December 26th, 2015

A Few Things We Were Talking About On Rounds …

Remember when people passed out papers of interesting clinical studies and relevant reviews? And how some doctors even had a special stamp they put in the upper right hand corner? OK, full confession — I did that. A lot. See evidence to the right. Haven’t used the thing in well over a decade, surprised I still […]

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December 12th, 2015

The 2015 ID Fellowship Match “Historic Bad”: Part 1, Debating the Cause

This year’s ID fellowship match has just taken place, and the results were, ahem, not pretty. Part 1 will cover why we’re in this situation; in Part 2, I’ll offer some reasons for optimism, and even some solutions. According to data provided by NRMP, 117 of the 335 ID fellowship positions were unfilled. Dan Diekema from U of […]

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August 30th, 2015

(Not) Doing the Retinal Exam, and the Importance of Acknowledging Limitations

This past week, the New England Journal of Medicine released one of its excellent instructional videos, detailing how to do direct ophthalmoscopy to examine the retina. That’s the use of one of those hand-held gizmos — an ophthalmoscope, see picture on the right — to look at the back of the eye. As usual, the […]

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August 9th, 2015

The Pain — and Potential Power — of Electronic Health Records in One Little Anecdote

Here’s a scintillating series of events that happened recently on our inpatient consult service: Reason for consult: “Treatment of UTI in a 26-year-old pregnant woman with multiple allergies.” Culture result:  Group B strep, resistant to clindamycin and nitrofurantoin. She’s been on the latter. Patient’s allergies as listed on her chart:  Penicillins, cephalosporins, sulfonamides. Plan per OB […]

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August 1st, 2015

Ten Reasons to Attend Our “Infectious Diseases in Primary Care” Course

With an up-front apology for the shameless plug — sorry! — here are 10 great reasons to attend our annual postgraduate course. It’s called Infectious Diseases in Primary Care, and takes place October 14-16 here at the Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston. All the topics are clinically relevant to day-to-day practice. Look at these topics! There’s a […]

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June 20th, 2015

Alex Rodriguez’ Story Reminds Me of a Case of Scientific Misconduct — Until It Doesn’t

If you’ll forgive me a bit of baseball-related rambling, there’s an incredible story going on this year with the resuscitation of Alex Rodriguez, both as a player and, even more remarkably, as a person in the public eye. Or, to quote the play-by-play announcer Michael Kay, who on Friday got it perfectly when he commented on A-Rod’s 3000th […]

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June 4th, 2015

A Slightly Less Painful Way to Learn the Three-Letter Abbreviations for HIV Meds

One of the stupid things about being an HIV/ID specialist is the highly arcane code we use to abbreviate HIV treatments. Why was zidovudine originally AZT, and now ZDV? Why is lamivudine 3TC? And tenofovir TDF? Of course there are legitimate biochemical reasons why these are the right abbreviations, but they are lost to most […]

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