Emergency Physician, Educator, Researcher, interested in the microbiome, evolution, and medicine
In the spirit of flipping the classroom, there will be some changes coming to the Evolution Medicine blog. I will soon be posting short podcasts and videos that will be designed for students of the evolutionary medicine course. These podcasts are also aimed at emergency physicians (like myself) and trainees […]
Last year Critical Care interviewed experts in the field, and asked what they predicted would be big ideas for the future. I have posted an abbreviated response from John Marini MD of the University of Minnesota, whose idea revolved around the idea of adaptation in critical care medicine (I removed […]
It is somewhat remarkable that in 2014 people are still arguing about the role of fever in illness. To recap, Matthew Kluger back in the early 1970s showed that a behavioral fever was critical in keeping lizards alive after experimental infection with gram-negative bacteria. Kluger subsequently showed that fever improves […]
“Musical composition should bring happiness and joy to people and make them forget their troubles.” Horace Ward Martin Tavares Silver The only thing this post has to do with with evolution is the marvelous fact that Homo sapiens has evolved a capacity to create and enjoy music, especially hard bop […]
As an emergency physician I deal with risks and probabilities, not certainty. What is the risk that my patient will die or get worse if I send them home? What is the chance that they have some life threatening disorder that presents very similarly to a common benign condition? What […]
We are continuing on the theme of “normal” versus “abnormal” in medicine today. It turns out that there is clever medical lexicon to describe the insatiable urge to make all lab results and other findings normal in critical care medicine: Euboxia is the state whereby all boxes on a pathology […]
The New York Times today published a piece on the harm of overtreatment when physicians medicalize normal findings. Infants should not be treated with an ineffective medication for a nonexistent problem. Click on the image to read the story:
Hypertension, or high blood pressure, is a well known risk factor for stroke. Reducing blood pressure with blood pressure medications, such as an angiotensin receptor blocker (ARB), has been shown to reduce the risk of future stroke. So, reducing blood pressure is a good thing for strokes, right? Apparently many […]
Researchers in biomedicine often use the following logic: I. In critical illness, biomarker X is elevated compared to healthy controls. II. A retrospective observational study shows that the higher the level of X, the greater the risk of death. II. It follows then, that high levels of X are harmful and […]
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