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This was last months column from The Free Lance-Star. At the risk of being a bit esoteric, for a variety of reasons I am focused on health and social inequities in the US. I’m talking about what the American Public Health Association defines as “a particular type of health difference that is…

This great comment form the Washington Post was forwarded to me by the co-manager of the end-of-life group we are running. It makes the point that we not only need to think differently about palliative care, but about dying. The Washington Post 9/8/2020 Health Perspective In pandemic era, the term…

Every couple of months for the last couple of years, a group of mostly elderly Unitarians gather around the board room table in the Moncure Conway room at the Unitarian Fellowship building in Fredericksburg and talk about how they’re going to end it all. Not how they are going to…

The American Gastroenterological Association is souring on the idea of probiotics. “The public assumptions about the benefits are not well founded” notes Dr. Grace Su, professor of gastroenterology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, lead author of new guidelines on probiotics just published by the AGA in the June…

I was talking to my good buddy from down the road who helps with a lot of yard work projects – who my wife, Paula, refers to as my “yard husband.” We were having a coffee at Dishman’s corner store, recovering from a grueling hour of work – laying down…

Sometimes you hear of a brilliant idea and are thinking “why isn’t everyone jumping on this?” When it’s an idea that could have a major impact on the spread of COVID-19, it’s even more frustrating that the powers-that-be aren’t implementing. I am talking about the Kinsa Health atypical illness surveillance.…

I took my life in my hands the other day - wanting to see how things are on the front lines of the COVID-19 epidemic.  To do this, I went and shadowed Grace Frye one of the nursing team on 2 South - the unit that has been repurposed from…

It is a fiery debate that is raging over what is the right thing to do about COVID-19.  Are we underestimating this virus. Has it yet to show it’s true colors, as did the Spanish flu of 1918 as it came back in far more lethal form. Or is “the…

This first appeared in Front Porch, Fredericksburg, VA in December 2019. It may sound a little perverse, but getting colon cancer was “ the best thing that ever happened to me” says Kendra Morgan. A Cancer Story With a Twist Kendra was working for a government contracting agency providing services…

Here’s a story to get you clean-freaks going. Insurance agents netQuote were interested in finding out how contaminated the back seats of ride share vehicles are – licensed cabs are required to get regular cleaning, but ride share vehicles aren’t. They had a team take bacterial swabs from various surfaces…

                                                                        October 2019 The rather scrawny marijuana plant in the Poison Garden at Blarney Castle attracted a lot of attention – but this, and the other medicinal and intoxicant plants in the garden made the point that drugs and poisons aren’t so different.  My wife Paula and I were on what…

It's good to come across some basic, low-tech, common sense medical care that has the potential to save a lot of morbidity and mortality in this day and age where everyone seems obsessed with the latest high-tech gizmos – the latest surgical robot that the local hospital has acquired; the…

Currently in London, and yesterday made a sortie to the Welcome Institute.  Went to Misbehaving Bodies– an exhibit bringing together the works of photographer and film maker Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery, “two artists who whose work explores chronic illness and experiences of care” A no-holds-barred and confrontational look at how…

One of the cheesy maxims I lay on my patients all the time is “information is everything.” For you to be able to oversee your medical care, you need to know what you’re dealing with. You need to know about your disease (the other vital information is for you and…

You could say I got lucky the other day. It was time for my colonoscopy – which bawdy comedians talk about as “the garden hose” (it maybe about the same thickness, but is not actually50 feet long).   This was a routine screening, done at the Surgery Center of Central Virginia (SCCV)…

A seemingly irrelevant organism may be our savior.

A study by the University of Newcastle, in Australia into the whole business of contamination of the world by plastic microparticles claims we ingest around 2000 a week – which is the equivalent of a credit card. Commissioned by the World Wildlife Fund, it was a worldwide study to assess…

Are schools in the US making kids psychiatrically incompetent?

Diets can make you overweight in the long term

“Like drinking from the fire hose” was how Scott, the second year medical student from UVa who was precepting with me last week, described life in the real world