Are You More Than Your Lab Test Numbers? I’ve heard the story many times: a patient comes into a doctor’s office for a “checkup”. He or she is handed glowing lab reports, told they’re in the peak of health – walks out and drops dead. So our lives are more than the sum of our […]
Doctor Versus Patient – The Case of Chronic Pain (6/25/12)
When Words Don’t Mean the Same Things to People If there are fifteen treatments for an illness, chances are good that many don’t work very well. That’s the case with chronic pain. Pain is really an information issue. The brain senses something is very awry. We then call that feeling pain. And our sense of […]
“Don’t talk to the patient” (12/16/11)
A Nurse’s Story You know things are screwy if nurses can lose their jobs for talking to patients. A nurse I know at the main regional hospital has an excellent record, plus decades of experience on medical wards. She was admonished that she was “wasting” too much time talking to patients. “They told me to […]