Medcast news and blog
Do as I say, not what I do!
In the country town where I grew up there was a GP who got very drunk at the golf club on a regular basis. His antics were a source of community amusement, and he had a lot of patients with similar alcohol misuse problems – mostly because he never talked to them about their drinking habits.
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In all OSCE cases, you have three minutes of reading time. One of the tricks of success is optimising that three minutes.
Men and women are different from each other. What a profound statement that is! Also one that could get me into a lot of trouble, particularly if it led to a discussion about whether that difference was genetically or culturally determined. I’m going to say it anyway, because I’m thinking about depression and suicide and the ways in which men and women express their distress differently.
What is the evidence for 'medical expulsive therapy' using alpha blockers?
Eating disorders are truly holistic, affecting all biopsychosocial dimensions of health so we need to keep an open mind and our antennae alert in a wide variety of clinical scenarios in General Practice.
We want to DO something for our patients, in part driven by guidelines - get their blood pressure down, improve their HbA1c, improve their life expectancy, but have we forgotten to ask - is this what you really want? And at what point are we doing more harm than good with the treatments we prescribe?
Are you having difficulty getting your head around the use of technology in mental health care? The idea that computer programs might interact with humans in a humanlike way has been around for decades but ideas about implementation are getting more and more sophisticated.
Thankfully, Australian doctors nowadays will rarely see a case measles. Recently however, most states have issued measles outbreak alerts, largely linked to travellers visiting or returning from overseas.
There is a tendency to consider hearing loss a wasted consultation, a referral wasted time. But hearing loss leads to marked isolation, significant reduction in quality of life and has a huge economic impact.
'All screening programmes do harm; some do good as well, and, of these, some do more good than harm at reasonable cost’.