The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is encouraging all baby boomers (that’s you–if you were born between 1945 and 1965) to get a simple, onetime blood test to see if you have been exposed to the hepatitis C virus. The CDC estimates that 3.2 million Americans have been exposed to the hep C virus. Now Read more
Medicine
Her concern was palpable as she spoke about her son. Almost in middle school, the boy had learning and attention difficulties. As someone with a healthcare background, she knew enough to alert her son’s pediatrician to the child’s lifelong snoring but was told “not to worry.” That’s when she contacted me. Should she get a Read more
The process of becoming a physician is an amazing and complicated journey. One part of this journey that gets little attention is how we teach (or don’t teach) our doctors-in-training to care for their own health. We certainly ask them to retain huge amounts of information, and we stress the importance of being deeply dedicated Read more
This spring, the Einstein office of faculty development ran an event for 100 medical educators. Among the topics we explored: using social media in medical education. The all-day session featuring social media mavens Dr. Kent Bottles and Dr. Katherine Chretien drew faculty in droves. As a result of the strong interest in this topic, I Read more
The presidential and senatorial elections won’t be the only hotly contested issues on Election Day in Massachusetts this year. On Tuesday, November 6, Massachusetts residents will vote on a Death with Dignity Law. If the ballot measure passes, Massachusetts will join Oregon and Washington in legalizing physician-assisted suicide. Physician-assisted suicide was made legal in Montana in 2009 by a Read more
A recent article published in the New England Journal of Medicine reports that Alzheimer’s disease (AD) can be identified decades before clinical symptoms are recognized—through changes in clinical and biological markers. Approximately one in seven adults in the United States over the age of 70 has dementia, and one in 10 is affected by Alzheimer’s Read more
