HIV and ID Observations

March 16th, 2023

Oral Antibiotic Therapy for Endocarditis — Are We There Yet?

Two terms in clinical research appear frequently in abstracts, conference presentations, and published papers — “clinical practice” and more recently, “real-world.” Many research snobs turn up their noses at both, finding them imprecise or pretentious. I confess to flinching each time I read “real-world” — isn’t everything “real-world”? If not, what’s the opposite? Mouse studies? (They’re […]

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January 22nd, 2019

Unanswerable Questions in Infectious Diseases — Treatment Duration in Endocarditis: 4 Weeks, 6 Weeks, Other?

Time to get back to some tough clinical decisions. It’s been a while. We’ve done The Abdominal Collection and Duration of Antimicrobial Therapy, Persistent MRSA Bacteremia, and The Positive Cultures for Candida in an ICU Patient. However, that series of posts appeared here in early 2014, which means it’s been 5 years with no “Unanswerable Questions.” Lest you think that […]

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March 25th, 2017

HIV and Hepatitis C Are No Longer the Most Serious Infectious Threats to People Who Inject Drugs

I had dinner with my daughter Mimi the other evening, and was ruminating about how things have changed since I started work as an Infectious Diseases doctor around 25 years ago. Here’s an excerpt of our chat: Me:  There are way more cases of endocarditis in young people than there used to be, a complication of injecting drugs. People in their 20s and […]

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