May 01, 2013
Dental care is often cited among the greatest unmet health need of children. Primary care providers can help solve this problem.
April 02, 2013
Weight is one of the toughest topics to discuss with patients, but we can no longer avoid it as the obesity epidemic grows.
March 04, 2013
Clinicians must carefully question our patients about the source of their prescription drugs to make sure they are obtaining these products from legitimate sources.
February 05, 2013
Primary-care clinicians need to educate parents of young children on dangers such as suffocation, car safety, falls, burns and choking.
January 01, 2013
Deconditioning -- a complication of POTS -- is also a common cause of morbidity and mortality in preventable diseases such as obesity.
December 03, 2012
It seems everyone wants a solution to the primary-care doctor shortage, but few are really interested in significant change when it affects them.
November 01, 2012
People who participate in frequent family meals are more likely to get healthy and stay healthy.
October 01, 2012
Proactive disease prevention and health-promoting patient education is a hallmark in the venue of primary-care providers.
September 05, 2012
Bullying can begin as early as kindergarten, and it can affect all children regardless of race, gender and socioeconomic status.
August 07, 2012
About 34% of consumers in a 2012 survey reported using social media to search for health information.
July 03, 2012
One day health-care providers will wonder how we could have possibly ever gotten by without EHRs.
June 05, 2012
Is it a good thing or a bad thing when laypeople are able to order their own genetic profiles and interpret their own results?
May 07, 2012
Teen girls will come up with 100 reasons to use tanning beds. We as health-care providers need to give parents one really big reason to say no.
April 03, 2012
A layer of bureaucracy in health care exists in which insurance regulators determine where a patient will die based on information from well-intentioned but inexperienced nurse case managers.
March 06, 2012
Despite the positive inroads and contributions that physician assistants and nurse practitioners have made over the past decades, we still face professional opposition.
Just 8% of participants in a study assessing how primary care patients who are prescribed opioids are tracked underwent urine testing, only half made regular visits to their prescribers and 23% received more than one early opioid refill.
January 04, 2012
Employment opportunities are limited today for many people seeking work, yet health-care needs are on the rise and the demand for nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) to care for the country's baby-boomers is increasing.
December 12, 2011
As physician assistants and nurse practitioners continue to grow in numbers, so have medical malpractice claims against them. It may be time to consider carrying personal professional-liability insurance policy.
November 28, 2011
"Bath salts" are new synthetic drugs that are typically found as white, light tan or brown powders, believed to contain psychoactive chemicals known as mephedrone and/or methylenedioxypyvrovalerone.
October 23, 2011
Politics, laws, rules and regulations are the very core of what drives what clinicians can and can't do; it determines reimbursement and therefore your salary. To be blissfully unaware is lazy. To be aware and completely uninvolved is just shameful.
September 26, 2011
Common reasons that parents give when declining human papillomavirus vaccine for their children are, "My teen is not sexually active," or "Maybe we'll wait until he/she is a bit older." This thinking negates the vaccine's preventive purpose.
Only 5.9% of eligible candidates receive the recommended pertussis booster vaccine, and the disease remains one of the leading causes of vaccine-preventable deaths worldwide.
July 30, 2011
Is professionalism in medicine on the decline? A few months ago I saw a new patient who had transferred from another practice because the physician there wore sweatpants to the patient's last appointment.
Emergency contraception is no more contraception than abortion. Now don't get me wrong: I am very pro-choice. But the emergency contraceptive pill implies to misguided people that they don't have to take responsibility for sexual activity until after the fact.
Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) is a serious health condition that occurs in 4% to 12% of pregnancies, but recent research showing significant screening gaps for the disease makes the problem an even greater concern.
As a health-care provider I can't think of a more pressing problem than that of tort reform. This issue is staring us in the face and demanding a collective swift, supportive action by the medical community.
Many clinicians misuse the term evidence-based medicine. Something needs to be done to prevent these words (and this concept) from becoming another medical cliché.
NVIA, VAERS protect against liability, ensure public safety.
The therapeutic use of music, particularly among those who are terminally ill, has tremendous benefits.
Clinicians need to better screen their patients and educate them about when best to begin obtaining routine mammograms.
Will there be enough primary-care providers to treat the new patients covered under the Affordable Care Act?
Research shows that most Americans would want to know if they were severely ill and likely to die.
If you lose weight, does it matter how you lost the weight? Not really.
A patient is at risk for one medication error per day, and about one-fourth of related injuries are preventable.
There has been a recent explosion in the diagnosis if delusions of parasitosis, in which patients mistakenly believe they have a skin infestation.
Occupational, financial, and life events must be considered when trying to pinpoint the problem.
Do you have a patient who is impossible to communicate with? Our expert has some advice.
A study found that physicians who have been in practice longer may be at risk for providing lower-quality care.
Numerous Internet resources can help clinicians stay current with influenza outbreaks and other infectious disease developments.
Have clinicians become too dependent on technology?
Why is HIV testing so different from other types of routine screening?
I thought it might be useful to share some quick ways you can improve the safety and efficiency of your prescriptions and reduce pharmacy callbacks.
Tailoring exercise recommendations to meet the unique needs of each patient gives those patients a better chance of meeting the fitness goals they have set with you.
Noncompete clauses harm our patients and the public.
A multidisciplinary, nurse-coordinated, family-based program improved lifestyles and reduced cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk among patients and their families in hospital and general-practice settings
You might be surprised to know that even if you're not utilizing complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapies, some of your patients probably are...
Are we providing recommended vaccines to our patients? The answer is no.
