Grand Rounds, Volume 3, No 33

Welcome to Grand Rounds, a carnival of posts submitted by medical bloggers every week. It’s the best of the medical blogosphere, and I am privileged to host this week.

This week’s grand rounds is dedicated to our favorite surgery registrar, Barbados Butterfly, whose blog was unceremoniously taken down not too long ago. I will not write here of the circumstances of her leaving the blogosphere, or posit the details thereof. I wish only to celebrate her as the quintessential medical blogger that she was.

Barb’s blog was everything a medical blog is supposed to be – well-written, thoughtful, honest, educational, entertaining, heartwarming, humorous, heart wrenching and above all, real. I only hope that I occasionally achieve what Barb did with every post of her blog. She was (and is) the best.

Barb, this one’s for you.

Best in Show (Read down the 1st letter of each section to spell out our favorite registrar’s name…)

Sid Schwab’s post War Story should be required reading for every president and every legislator before they decide to send us to war, and by every American who thinks they have an opinion about the war in which we are currently fighting. Link to it, email it, send to everyone you know.

Advice from medical bloggers

Planning on getting a full body CT? Have you thought about the radiation risks? Fortunately, Dr Wes has done all the work for you, so head on over to his post The Radiation Risk of CT Scanning and learn what you need to consider before submitting yourself to those rays…

If your patient has upper abdominal symptoms that don’t respond to medications, don’t wait two years before referring her for a scope. Dr GC George shows us why.

Looking for reliable health information on the Web? Tech Medicine take you on a tour of the search engines you can use.

Hyperlordosis. It’s not just for Pregnant Women. Jolie Bookspan tells us what causes it and how to avoid it.

Rants

#1 Dinosaur is on his soapbox this week, and who can blame him? The American Cancer Society is using patient surveys to imply that he is not doing enough to cajole his patients into routine screening. He attended the department meeting from hell and then was subjected to another hospital’s blatant advertising when all he wanted to do was buy some stationary. Head on over and give him some love, he needs it…

Grunt Doc takes on Intel’s Andy Grove Plan for Fixing Health Care. We hate it when folks with money think they know everything, and suggest that throwing their technology at a problem is all you need to fix it.

Better be careful…

Dr Enoch Choi is dealing with an outbreak of Listeriosis and a turkey recall. This is no small matter for pregnant women (or turkeys).

Privacy disclaimers are not the solution to maintaining patient privacy in email communications. But encryption may be. Read all about it over at the Haversion Canal.

Interested Participant tells us that they are considering banning plastic containers in Dubai. Do they know something we don’t?

Art (and Autism)

Artist Koen Hauser’s amazing photos merging anatomic details and human models are on display over at Unbounded Medicine.

Where are all the adults with Autism? As Kristina Chew tells us, “they are living among us”.

Diabetes

Kim at Emergiblog wonders and worries about how the young man she treated with newly diagnosed diabetes is doing. After reading her post, I’m worried about him too…

I wish we could somehow introduce him to Kerri from Six Until Me, who has learned to accept a lifetime spent with her diabetes by viewing it as Gromit to her Wallace. This wonderful post about how acceptance does not mean defeat is a must read for all diabetics (as is her blog). Also check out Kerri’s recent trip to the Big Apple, including an amazingly gorgeous photo of the tulips in Union Square.

The consequences of starting insulin therapy extend far beyond glucose control, especially if your patient is a truck driver, as Dr Hebert knows all too well. An excellent post that illustrates the delicate balancing act doctors and patients must play within the US healthcare system.

Is it time for a dating service for diabetics? Maybe located at Diabetes Mine? Looks like Amy’s considering it…

Obstetrics

Midwife with a Knife delivers Twins! Breech! Stat! (Great photos…)

Searching for Patients

Join the chase, as Universal Health searches for a lost demented patient in the halls of an old relic of a hospital in my home town.

It’s the last day of the month, and Psyched Out plays Bounty Hunter to try to find all her patients who have been MIA. God bless you, Psyche, for all that you do!

Business of Healthcare

Jay the insurance shopper is trying to pay as little as possible to get his lipoma removed. It leads him to consider how consumer directed health plans, like HSAs, could help control a lot of this country’s health care costs.

Generic Biologics – Could they reduce prices or are they just a bad idea? David Williams at Health Business Blog reviews a recent paper on the topic and weighs in on the question.

In his post Life, Liberty and Free Health Care, Bob Vineyard at InsureBlog exercises his first amendment rights and presents a counterpoint to every point made in what appears to have been a heated panel discussion about universal health care.

Personalized medicine and genomic health care – Eye on DNA interviews the CEO of Genomic Healthcare Strategies, and gives us a glimpse at a possible future. I was fine till I read the list of new stakeholders in this area, and realized just how much of the trend in health care is to take it out of the hands of physicians and put in anywhere else it will make money in a direct-to-consumer market. I wonder where the ethics in this brave new world will come from?

Unsung heroes – Let’s sing about them here

Val Jones tells the true story of a young girl who was given a second chance at life by a US plastic surgeon. She is planning to “pay it forward” by becoming a nurse.

Vitum Medicinus, a Canadian first-year medical student, tells of the incredible acts of a 14-year-old boy: including battling cancer, overcoming three recurrences, and his latest: writing a children’s book to inspire anybody battling adversity.

Trying to make things better

The folks over at Anxiety, Addictions and Treatments are encouraged by recent legislative action to create Health Centers of Excellence to respond to the mental health needs of returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans.

After all these years, racial and economic disparities persist in health care. Christopher Cornue explores this topic in the first of a series about this complex topic.

Touchy Topics

Teens and cybersex? Nancy Brown of Teen Health 411 tackles yet another touchy subject. As she puts it “Another reason to keep computers in public places.”

Dr Emer examines the reasons why patients might trust or not trust their doctors, including a discussion on how doctor-big Pharma relationships are viewed in the Phillipines, in his blog Parallel Universes.

ER Stories (and ethanol…)

Get out your Kleenex before you read this wonderfully sad story “Goodbye, from Poland” over at NY Emergency Medicine.

ERnursey shows us just how serious pneumococcal pneumonia can be. Scary…

Had a few too many Cosmopolitans? Head on over to Girlvet’s blog Tales of an Emergency Room Nurse, where you can join every drunk in the city sleeping it off in her ER

Reviews

Chronic Babe interviews film maker Daneen Akers about her film Living with Fibromyalgia. Daneen’s mother was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, and Daneen and her husband made this film to educate others about the condition.

Paul Auerbach, MD reviews a book called New Medicine: Complete Family Health Guide – How to use Complementary and Conventional Medicine for Safe and Effective Treatment. He seems to like it…

Family Stories

JC Jones, RN at Healthline has written a beautiful post about the intersection of a movie she loves (The Barbarian Invasions) and the death of her dad from prostate cancer.

Timing is everything, as Laurie Edwards tell us in her post about her Dad’s recent visit to the cath lab as she explores the what-ifs that could have led to a different outcome.

Susan Palwick posts in real time as she waits for the paramedics to respond to the 911 call she made after her mother slurred her speech and then stopped talking during their long-distance telephone conversation.

Life of a doctor

The life of a doctor is a series of choices between career and self. I hope Dr Brokeback makes the right one for herself.

Ali Tabatabaey at The Differential realizes just how important the “regular” little joys of daily life can be, especially when they are taken from us. A lovely little post.

So is being a doctor as glamorous as they say? TSCD of the blog Sunlight Follows Me (how much do I love that blog title?..) explores just what glamorous means in the real life of a doctor.

Yes, its May!

If May is better sleep month, then why am I up after midnight? Oh right, this Grand Rounds thing…

May is also Mental Health Awareness Month – and the theme in Canada is Work-life balance. I followed the links and took a quiz to discover I am a bit out of balance. Maybe I’m spending too much time blogging….

And finally, one last post – a beautiful tribute to our friend Barb, written as only Dr Michael Hebert can write it. So Long, Barb. We miss you and wish you all the best!

Next week’s Grand Rounds host will be will be Daniel Goldberg at Medical Humanities Blog. And thanks again to Nick Genes at Blogborygmi for creating and organizing Grand Rounds. You can check out Nick’s Web site for an updated list of past and upcoming Grand Rounds. Thanks for visiting!