Viewpoints
Tuesday, September 03, 2019
We all make diagnostic errors
by Dan Mayer, MD
Recognizing how your brain works — and better understanding the situations when you’re likely to slip up — can help you make fewer mistakes.
Tuesday, August 27, 2019
Making care safer for sick kids at home
by Amy Louise Billett, MD
Every day, millions of parents measure medications, assess symptoms, or even care for central lines for their sick or disabled children at home. A safety expert argues that hospitals can — and must — prepare them better.
Friday, August 09, 2019
It’s time to get serious about resident wellness
by Srijan Sen, MD, PhD
It’s not enough to offer meditation and teach yoga. Institutions need systemic changes to protect the well-being of trainees, argues a researcher who has studied thousands of residents.
Tuesday, August 06, 2019
It’s time to end gun violence
by David J. Skorton, MD
AAMC President and CEO David J. Skorton, MD, calls on academic medicine to be a voice against the hatred that fuels mass shootings, and to work toward solutions to prevent firearm-related tragedies.
By the time Tom Patterson, PhD, was medically evacuated from Egypt to Germany after falling ill on vacation, his condition was rapidly deteriorating. Patterson, 68, had become infected with Acinetobacter baumannii, one of the most antibiotic-resistant superbugs known to science. None of the antibiotics German doctors tried could contain the spreading infection. Patterson was finally transported to the University of California, San Diego, (UC San Diego) hospital, where the infection spread to his bloodstream and he lapsed into a coma. Doctors there told his family that he was almost certainly going to die.
Bacteria like Acinetobacter baumannii, resistant to almost every antibiotic in the pharmacological arsenal, are on the rise. When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a landmark report on the issue in 2013, the agency estimated that 2 million Americans contract antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections each year and 23,000 die of them. The toll today is far deadlier. A 2018 study pegged the annual number of deaths in the United States at between 153,113 and 162,044. And in a 2019 report called No Time to Wait, the United Nations warned that by 2050, multidrug resistant infections could kill upwards of 10 million people a year around the world.
Academic Medicine in the News
Tuesday, August 20, 2019
Getting men to the doctor with “Man Cave Health”
Men are less likely than women to get an annual physical and more likely to work or play through pain or injury. To address this issue and to spread awareness about prostate cancer, the department of urology at Mount Sinai Health System has partnered with a nonprofit organization called Man Cave Health to create a sports-themed doctor’s office that houses multiple specialists along with educational resources on prostate health.
Tuesday, August 20, 2019
Med student gets closer to home by serving local community
Mario Castellanos, a third-year medical student at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW), grew up in the second-largest city in Honduras, and has found similarities between that community and the Hispanic community in east Milwaukee. Working with the MCW chapter of the Latino Medical Student Association, Mario has engaged young local students in science and medicine, among other efforts.
Tuesday, August 20, 2019
Making academia more inclusive through drag
Through the “Science is a Drag” drag show, researchers at McMaster University in Toronto, Canada, work to create science-centric events and spaces that are inclusive of the LGBTQ+ community. At the event, scientists perform in drag and then provide jargon-free descriptions of their research.
