“It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.” - Sir William Osler






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You may have noticed there has been a slight delay in posting. My apologies.  (Full disclosure: I started this post in May 2013.)

Quite a lot has been happening. I'll try to condense it for you.

- I once again went through the agony of recertifying in Internal Medicine. This happens every ten years and it seems to get worse every single time. The good news is that now all internists are equally discommoded by this process, instead of only those who were certified after 1990. The older doctors who were originally told that they would not have to go through this process are now stuck with it just like the rest of us. An online revolt began almost immediately; a torrent of protesting emails have been fired off to the Board and to the ACP (our academic organization for Internal Medicine). So perhaps we will finally get some relief from this torment.

In case you are wondering about ongoing medical education, there has been a longstanding requirement for licensure that all doctors must earn a certain number of CME credits every year. The certification process has been added on top of that requirement and, in my opinion, is the board's way of grabbing control of the lucrative medical-education pie. Many doctors are threatening to let their certification expire. You can still practice without being board certified, but most medical groups and hospitals will be reluctant to hire a doctor who is not certified in some specialty. The question is, would an established physician be dismissed for letting his or her specialty certification expire? No one seems to know.

- I turned fifty last year and celebrated it in a way I did not expect. On my birthday my mother passed out cold while walking to the refrigerator, crashed to the floor, was taken to the hospital and found to have a cardiac arrhythmia which resulted in her getting a pacemaker a week later. Fortunately she is now doing fine. But the month before my father had had a serious stroke. Add in an aunt who needed hip surgery and two cataract surgeries on my mother, and you can see it's been a very busy year.


So what shall we talk about then? The heat wave, perhaps. It has been really warm and humid for over a week, what with two rogue hurricanes tracking up from Mexico through the Gulf of California. In Los Angeles we got little or no rain, but Nevada to the east got enough to wash out part of Interstate 15. Like many older houses on the west side, mine has no air conditioning; and because the windows are French-style that open on hinges, rather than the slide up-and-down kind, I cannot use a window unit. I dug out the giant box fan my father gave me years ago and it has been a lifesaver. It must be 40 to 50 years old and still works like a champ.

Southern California residents are also now having to cope with the constant announcements that we are in a Drought. The Worst Drought Ever. We must save water. Well, of course we must; any fool knows that we live in a semiarid climate and the population count here is far too dense for the amount of rainfall we get. We were bound to run out of water at some point. Some years we get heavy rain and flooding, some years we get very little rain. This past winter we only had one significant storm and that was in February. California is working on desalination plants, but I think that water storage tanks in everyone's backyard to be filled during the rainy season would also be a good tactic to try. Strangely this idea has not been discussed in the local press (as far as I can tell).

And lastly, our medical director has decided that the medical group ought to have a blog. It won't be for the public, but available on company Intranet only. I wound up being one of the doctors picked to write for it and was happy to participate, but he came up with this idea over a year ago and we still don't have the website up and running. Enduring the various delays has been somewhat frustrating, but we are told that "any day now" the blog will be functional. Uh-huh.

The other problem regarding the work blog is that our Fearless Leader wants posts of 150 words or less. I told him that at 150 words I was just getting started. He says the idea is more to present ideas that will "foster debate" about the best methods of practice. Okay, I can see that would be educational and it will force me to stay current on topics such as vaccination recommendations, when to start treating high cholesterol levels, and so forth. But it won't be very entertaining. My idea is that after a month or so I will start mixing in a little entertainment as well. We'll see how it works.

He doesn't know about this blog. I aim to keep it that way. I'll post more soon.

Labels: Los Angeles, Medicine, The Doctor's Life

posted by Dr. Alice at #