GO TEAM GO! - HEALTH CARE'S NEW TEAM APPROACH
A movement is afoot to improve your health (and the whole country’s health), give you a better healthcare experience, and lower your healthcare costs. After three years this movement has shown spotty success by some measures, but I think it holds lots of promise and deserves continued support. Why should you care? Because your doctors and other care-givers will do a better job (and keep you healthier) when they can work on your problems together, and with more information at their fingertips. Read more...

November/December 2010

LIFE AS A COUNTRY DOC - SPICY FOODS, LOCAL CHICKIES, AND A HORSE I’m walking down the street in Yuma, Colorado, on the way to the phone company office to arrange a line for the home I’ve just moved into. Someone I’ve never seen steps out of the door of a shop and says, “Doc? Your office manager is looking for you.” So I walk into the store and call my brand new employee at our brand new medical clinic, where I’d just left her unpacking brand new supplies. Before I arrive at the phone company, two more shopkeepers, who haven’t gotten the message that I’d reached Linda, also hail me. Read more...

September/October 2010

A GREAT PERSONALITY - TANGIBLE TOOLS FOR GETTING ALONG When I was a teenager the worst thing you could say about a prospective blind date was that she had a great personality. The more glowing the endorsement of what was on the inside of your proposed partner, the more likely you weren’t going to like what was on the outside. In the world of adolescent dating “a great personality” was code for “unattractive,” the kiss of death for the average teenager.

July/August 2010

CUTE NURSES AND A BEER - STRAIGHT TALK BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR DOC Sometimes I provide medical coverage to our local hospice. On a recent trip to the ward where people come to die, I visited an elderly man who had just been admitted with a case of pneumonia that he’d chosen not to treat any further. He saw this infection as the final act of a several-year-long drama, during the course of which he’d lost his vigor and his independence. He’d outlived his spouse and all his friends. Read more...

May/June 2010

MY MOST DIFFICULT PATIENTS - BORDERLINE PERSONALITIES, MEDITATION, AND AUNT ELKE There’s a saying among medical professionals that everybody owes it to their colleagues to take on a borderline or two. “Borderline” refers to people with borderline personality disorder (BPD), who are some of the most challenging patients there are—so challenging the reasoning goes, that it’s only right that all practitioners assume their fair share of these difficult people. Read more...

March/April 2010

PRIVATE PRACTICE - PATIENT PRIVACY VS THE NEED TO KNOW
As a doctor, people tell you about their pain and their fears. They expose their bodies. They cry. They trust you. One of the worst ways to abuse that trust is to reveal these intimacies to somebody who doesn’t need to know. Most everybody in healthcare respects patients’ privacy as a matter of course, especially since Congress passed HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act in 1996. The law features extensive definitions of types of medical information, who can reveal what to whom, and when and how they can reveal it. The act is backed up by serious penalties, both civil and criminal, if you mess up. Read more...

Jan/Feb 2010

COMPASSIONATE SERVICE - THE BLURRED LINE BETWEEN DOCTOR AND FELLOW TRAVELER

The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet was the most important book I ever read because it jump-started my love of literature. That work, which I must have read not too long after it was published in 1954, awakened me to the ability of fiction to create a world more real than the chair I was sitting on while I read it. It’s the story of a couple of aspiring boy-scientists, David and Chuck, who answer a tiny newspaper want-ad that solicits a homemade rocket ship. And so the interplanetary adventure begins. Read more...

Nov/Dec 2009

THE DREAM LIFE
Every mammal takes time out to snooze, as do many other vertebrate phyla, including fish. But there’s a problem with defining sleep in species other than homo sapiens. Do they have to show similar brainwave changes as humans do when we sleep? Must they also go through a phase involving rapid eye movement (REM)? Depending on how you define sleep, there is pretty good evidence that even fruit flies regularly engage in a little shuteye (metaphorically speaking, because the insect actually has huge compound eyes and no eyelids). Read more...

Sept/Oct 2009

IT vs. TLC - Electronic medical records? Try listening first.
As far back as you look, the history of science is rife with puzzlement over the relationship between mind, spirit, consciousness, and experience on one side, and body on the other. How to reconcile the subjectivity of human life with the objectivity of science continues to be a central issue of post-modern life, especially when it comes to healthcare. Read more...

July/August 2009

Gaining on Pain
After graduating from medical school, I set out to be a kids’ doctor, enrolling in a pediatric residency. I figured that, as a pediatrician, I’d get to play during much of my workday. Now, at this stage of my career as a family doctor who doesn’t deliver babies any more and who has aged along with my patients, I don’t get to play with kids much. I find myself caring mostly for older folks and lots of people with chronic pain. Read more...

May/June 2009

Marriage Wows!
As a younger, single man one of my favorite poems was “Marriage,” written by Gregory Corso, a Beat Generation poet. The piece begins with the questions, “Should I get married? Should I be good? Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustus hood?” The poet goes on for eight verses arguing, with insight and humor, for and against entering into the bonds of matrimony. As you’d expect of an iconoclast such as Corso, he is not wholeheartedly in favor of marriage. He’s not completely against it either, holding out the impossibly romantic notion of a woman he’d be willing to wait 2000 years for. Needless to say, none of his lines of reasoning is about the health effects of marriage. Read more...

March/April 2009

Scientific Truth - fact or fashion
Before my grandmother married, she worked as a milliner, designing and constructing women’s hats. Despite her artistic eye and crafty hand, she was no slave to fashion, at least not by the time I knew her. Her standard going-out uniform was a navy blue dress that ran from clavicles to ankles, with chunky black shoes peeking out under her hemline. Read more...

Jan/Feb 2009

Letting go
Oryoki is a Japanese ceremonial form for serving and eating meals in which every movement is scripted, down to the tiniest detail, as only the Japanese can do at their hyper-compulsive best. For example, when the second (of three or four) bowls is served, it is to be picked up with the first three fingers of the right hand and placed on the open palm of the waiting server who ladles from the pot he’s set on the floor until the eater gives the hand signal to stop filling. Then the server hands the bowl back to the person being served, who takes it with two hands, and places it back down on the tray in front of her. It’s all done silently, choreographed by hand signals and gongs. This description barely scratches the surface of the ritual’s details. Read more...

Nov/Dec 2008

Doing without a 'God's-Eye' View
I’d like to build on the installment of my column that was published in the July-August issue. In that piece I described how I’d gotten cross-wise with a segment of the listening audience of KUNC public radio after the station aired a couple of my commentaries in which I described a study that suggested the possibility of direct mind-to-mind communication. Now I feel on the spot to explain where I really do stand vis-à-vis spiritual and paranormal stuff. Read more...

Sept/Oct 2008

WOO-WOO VERSUS SCIENTISM
When people ask about “Zen of Science,” I usually respond that I’m the token straight doctor who writes a column for this alternative medicine magazine. It’s fun playing the straight man for a change because I’m seen by many of my physician colleagues as sort of a free-thinking hippie. The truth is that, except for a little hypnosis here and there, most of the alternative medicine that I do is delivered to my rural patients in a plain manila envelope. You’ll have to open the envelope to see how this allopathic family doctor works to employ the lessons about compassion, healing and spirituality he’s learned over the course of his own eclectic quest for wisdom. Read more...

July/August 2008

HEY DOC: SHUT UP AND LISTEN
Everything changes, all the time. Case in point: you’ve probably noticed that the layout of the columns in Nexus and the mug shots are a little different. Most importantly for me, the space allotted to my work is less, which is good news in that it raises my pay rate per word. But so has my challenge increased. I’ve loved the opportunity that “Zen of Science” has given me to address the magazine’s sophisticated, engaged readership about important topics at the border between medicine and healing. Among other subjects, I’ve written about dying, diet, childbirth, pain, diabetes, and quantum physics. The challenge is to discuss such important topics in some depth, but using 500 words less. Read more...

May/June 2008

KICK THE SMOKING HABIT
Cancer of the nose was first recognized as an affliction of tobacco smokers by John Hill of London in 1761; cancer of the mouth was likewise indicted a few years later, in 1787, by Percival Pott. It took more than 100 years--with the popularity of inhaling and the invention of x-rays that could distinguish lung cancer from tuberculosis--before tobacco was implicated in lung cancer in the German medical literature. Thereafter, the pace of progress of medical knowledge about the evils of smoking grew exponentially. Other cancers, including those of the larynx and bladder, as well as chronic bronchitis, emphysema, and a huge jump in risk of heart attack and stroke were added to the list of tobacco’s ill-effects. Smoking was even found to increase the incidence of stomach ulcers. Read more...

March/April 2008

FUNCTIONAL FAMILY? READ NO FURTHER
And you’re still reading. As is nearly everyone who turned to this article. Are you from a functional family? Are your children? Do you know anyone whose family is completely functional? Do we even know what it means? Read more...

Jan/Feb 2008