I’ll start with this: it’s great to be back. I’ve been on hiatus from blogging for the past few months because of the exam I took last week: the medical boards, or Step 1, an eight hour test that covers all of the first two years of medical school to prepare us for the hospital [...]

In 1977, a group of doctors began a campaign to change the name of an inflammatory arthritis after discovering it was named after a Nazi doctor who planned and performed gruesome forced human experimentation that killed thousands. In one of these experiments, for example, Hans Conrad Julius Reiter inoculated Buchenwald concentration camp inmates with the microbe [...]

On Tuesday, Massachusetts voters will face the Death with Dignity Act and decide whether they are comfortable with the idea of a physician being able to provide medication that a terminally ill patient can self-administer to end his or her life. If the act passes, Massachusetts will join Oregon, Washington, and Montana in being one [...]

Doctors use different standards to judge scientific research depending on who funded it. They judge research funded by industry as less rigorous, have less confidence in the results, and are less likely to prescribe new drugs than when the funding source is either the NIH or unknown – even when the apparent quality of the [...]

“Sometimes, how you feel at the end of an interview can be clinically revealing,” my preceptor says. “How does this patient make you feel?” *** “Mr. M?” I ask gently, knocking on the hospital room door. “May I come in?” “Hello? Hello?” I enter at what I think is an invitation to me, but see [...]

“You are a red blood cell in the left subclavian artery, on your way to the brain. What vessels will you pass through?” One by one, the ten or so of us in the neuroanatomy lab bay recited the vessels in the Circle of Willis, answering additional questions about nerves we would pass by and [...]

It’s tough to prove gender bias. In a real-world setting, typically the most we can do is identify differences in outcome. A man is selected for hire over a woman; fewer women reach tenure track positions; there’s a gender gap in publications. Bias may be suspected in some cases, but the difficulty in using outcomes [...]

On Sunday, Slate republished an article from New Scientist, written by Harriet A. Washington, that reflected on the “anxieties and dilemmas” that may stem from peeking into a fetus’s genome before birth. “Do You Really Want to Know Your Baby’s Genetics?” the title asks. The piece is a response to a new technological advance in looking [...]

He was a family practitioner. He had a good relationship with the couple, helping to deliver their first baby two years earlier. He was happy to learn the reason for their appointment was that were expecting another. The second pregnancy could not have gone worse. Though she showed all the telltale signs and felt as [...]

In my last post, I discussed whether there is a place for race in medicine. I wrote that while sensitive consideration of race may sometimes be justified, the burden is on the medical researcher to explain why that is. That raises the question: what’s the next step? That is, suppose a researcher feels that stratifying [...]