I fell asleep in front of an episode of public TV’s Nova the other night and had this nightmare about wormholes and time travel. I thought I woke up at the hospital, but everything looked different. On my way to my office I kept seeing directional signs to what was apparently a continuing medical education […]
Every once in while, I get something practical and interesting in my mailbox. I posted about what the mailman brought me on November 15, 2011, (Bumpy the Bipolar Bear), shortlink http://wp.me/p1glcu-1rc . The postman brought me another jewel. I received the Fall 2011 marketing newsletter called the Chair’s Report from the Department of Psychiatry at The Mount Sinai Medical Center […]
I wrote a blog post about unusual psychiatry consultation questions for Cambridge University Press way back in the fall of 2010 and I thought it was worth revisiting. As a psychiatric consultant, I sometimes get questions that I think might be better for Alice in Wonderland. I often wonder what somebody must have been smoking when they filled out the consultation request […]
Today, the selection from Dr. Jenny Lind Porter’s “The Lantern of Diogenes and Other Poems” is one that could be about the loss of innocence [1]. In the Beginning, When Green Came On the Pasture…. In the beginning, when green came on the pasture, And on the meadow, and on the farthest hill, When the […]
I’m a white-haired geezer and it’s no mean feat to drag me into the 21st century. I’m not going to tell you my age, but I can remember mowing my lawn with a reel mower. I spelled it right; go look it up. But it’s hard to resist the homophone and it’s easy for me to think […]
I was given a paper about a study with a small number of patients, the authors of which concluded that aggression and impulse dyscontrol might be more common in patients with carcinoid syndrome [1]. A psychiatrist examined the patients by using a structured interview. Carcinoids are relatively rare neuroendocrine malignancies that are defined by their […]
Dr. Nopoulos is the Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Iowa and has many areas of interest including brain structure and function in oral-facial clefting disorders, schizophrenia, and Huntington’s Disease. She has won more outstanding teacher awards than you can shake a stick at. Her lab studies the structure and function of the brain […]
Recently a sharp junior resident in our combined internal medicine-psychiatry program gave a very interesting presentation at our Psychosomatic Medicine service weekly case conference about something I never heard of before, “Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy”. It’s a little scary to think that stress can induce a major coronary syndrome in susceptible persons, but that’s what it is. One of our internal […]
I found a couple of interesting articles on psychiatry’s image. Dr. Paul Fink is a psychiatrist who writes for Clinical Psychiatry News (CPN) on the Opinion page (Fink! Still at Large). He’s also a blogger. I ran across his article on Psychiatry’s image problem in the September 01, 2010 on-line issue, http://www.clinicalpsychiatrynews.com/views/fink-still-at-large-by-dr-paul-j-fink/blog/psychiatrists-continue-to-fight-for-respect-for-patients-and-profession/58b39005fd.html . Dr. Fink […]
Did you wonder where I got most of the data in the post on organ transplant? Dr. Andrea DiMartini’s work in liver transplantation is nothing short of phenomenal. She was one of the 2008 winners of the APM Visiting Professorship Award; she was sponsored by the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. She’ll be […]
The board re-certification examination for Psychosomatic Medicine is in 2015. Those of us who certified at the first exam ever in 2005 for this “supraspecialty” will be faced with the decision to either apply for the exam, which means being able to produce on demand (in case of an audit) the documentation of Performance in […]
Shortly after I got the comments in response to the post on antidepressants and atherosclerotic disease on August 18, 2011 (see shortlink http://wp.me/p1glcu-SG), my wife clued me in to a CNN article by Dr. Elizabeth Cohen, MD on a proposed psychiatric disorder, Post Traumatic Embitterment Disorder (PTED), link http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/08/17/bitter.resentful.ep/index.html?hpt=he_c2 [1]. In turn this led to my discovery (or rather rediscovery) […]
This is a Dirty Dozen update on catatonia, inspired by a colleague, Dr. James Beeghly, MD, who delivered an excellent presentation on the subject at a recent departmental Grand Rounds conference. It’s a follow-up to the catatonia quiz and I hope it clarifies a couple of points. I have other posts on catatonia here as well, all […]
This is a video with powerpoint presentation I put together recently after realizing that there are some practical realities to staffing a medical-psychiatry unit that make it an interesting challenge in the era of integrated care. I owe a lot to Roger Kathol, MD who built the Medical-Psychiatry Unit at The University of Iowa Hospitals […]
This is yet another GeezerVideo with slide show on a common psychiatric consultation question, decisional capacity assessment. In my opinion, it’s important to help med-surg colleagues develop greater confidence in their ability to conduct these assessments themselves. After all, the psychiatrist is really not able to hold an informed consent discussion about the risks and benefits of a […]
This is another Dirty Dozen presentation, this time on Somatoform Disorders. It can be complementary to the Dirty Dozen on Factitious Disorder and Malingering. ADDENDUM: The DSM-5 and the book “Essentials of Psychiatric Diagnosis: Responding to the Challenge of DSM-5 by Dr. Allen Frances, MD have a lot to say about the somatoform disorders. The […]
Well, I was supposed to participate in a telephone conference call with the Iowa Board of Medicine about Maintenance of Licensure (MOL) in Iowa on April 25, 2013, but when they called me at 3:30 PM, the board was already running 20 minutes late and I was too busy to really participate. On that particular […]
Please see short link for companion post on the STOPP criteria at short link http://wp.me/p1glcu-1Qk . So the latest meeting of the delirium project, we were working on edits to the delirium order set. Of course this will include an element of evaluating any anticholinergic and other medications that might increase the risk for delirium, […]
http://imweb.swmed.edu/sage/delirium_module/index.htm The link above takes you to the module Systems-Based Approach to Delirium for Multiple Learners-Interactive Web Module. It’s free and open access from Portal of Geriatric Online Education, at link http://www.pogoe.org/ . You can have access to all of the material on this site just by completing a short questionnaire about yourself and creating a username. I think […]
We want a new drug for moderate to severe pain and the drug company Nektar may possibly have a solution to the overprescription, fatal overdoses, and addiction associated with opioid analgesics. Prescription analgesics, particularly opioids, are now the most abused drugs in the U.S., second only to marijuana. Nektar’s web site says its new product, […]
Well Said…