Every day, rheumatology patients live with the realities of having a chronic disease that requires a lifetime of treatment. This knowledge can be an emotional burden, and some people deal with it better than others. Emerging research is showing that those patients who exhibit emotional control are better able to cope and ultimately experience a…
One parent wishes that she could have consulted a crystal ball at the beginning of her daughter’s illness to have “some kind of idea of what we were in for. There are so many stages of letting go of the idea of what your little kid is in for in life, what they are going…
Ankle arthritis is a debilitating condition that leaves many patients in severe pain and greatly limits their activities. Until recently, the standard treatment for bone-on-bone ankle pain has been ankle fusion, or arthrodesis, in which surgeons literally fuse the bones of the ankle joint together. However, in the past few years, total ankle replacement surgery,…
How are Annie and Abby? That’s a question some patients ask J. Michelle Kahlenberg, MD, PhD, a rheumatologist and assistant professor in the school of medicine at the University of Michigan, who also runs a lupus research lab at the University of Michigan Health System. Patients aren’t asking about her children, but family members of…
(Reuters Health)—Mental health problems, like anxiety and depression, may partly explain why people with rheumatoid arthritis have an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, according to a new study. Researchers linked anger, anxiety, depressive symptoms, job stress and low social support to increasing risk of hardening of the arteries, or atherosclerosis, for people with rheumatoid arthritis…
We all know that completely different medical conditions can create the same effects on our patients’ work lives. That is, from the employer’s purely administrative standpoint, an absence is an absence regardless of its cause. Even medical care professionals react differently to similar effects rendered by completely different circumstances. A Personnel Crisis Let me give…
The Friday night press release: When a politician or any public figure needs to disclose unfavorable news, chances are they will release it sometime on a late Friday afternoon or evening, hoping that nobody is paying attention. In fact, this behavior was coined “the take out the trash day” on the television political drama, The…
Follow-up Visit with Time A 62-year-old male patient returns to the office for a follow-up visit for chronic idiopathic gout without tophi. The patient’s present uric acid level is 4.0, and he is now taking allopurinol 450 mg per day. Previously, he was taken off indapamide due to an increase in his uric acid. He…
NEW YORK (Reuters Health)—Medical practitioners’ performance suffers when they are exposed to rudeness, new findings show. Neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) team members who heard disparaging comments while participating in a simulation exercise had lower diagnostic and procedural performance scores compared to team members who didn’t hear rude comments, Dr. Arieh Riskin, of Bnai-Zion Medical…
NEW YORK (Reuters Health)—Psoriasis is linked to a higher risk for arrhythmia, independent of classic cardiovascular (CV) risk factors, according to a study from Taiwan. “In my practice, arrhythmia as comorbidity is discussed during patient consultation along with other comorbidities,” said senior author Dr. Tsen-Fang Tsai of the Department of Dermatology at National Taiwan University…