People who contract HIV once can contract it again, often through the same risk behaviors that led to the initial infection. A long-standing question has been whether getting infected with a second strain of HIV leads to more rapid HIV disease progression than infection with a single strain.
To this point, a 24-year-old man who has sex with men recently asked me, "Doc, I already rang the bell, why do I care if I get HIV again?"
My answer is at TheBodyPro.
The Internet has lit up with news of a burgeoning Ebola virus outbreak in western Africa and the few cases that have trickled through to the United States.
This weekend, TV helicopters beat the air above the ambulance of a US doctor stricken with Ebola and transferred to Emory's high tech containment center for care. Viewers worldwide surely struggled to figure out how this was interesting, and why they were suddenly thinking about OJ Simpson.
Was this the beginning of the end? We'd all seen Gwenyth expire in Contagion so were we next?
Fortunately card-carrying epidemiologists have come to the rescue not with wonder drugs or martial law, but with the facts of the situation: this is a small epidemic largely confined to the developing world and unlikely to be a big deal in the US. It is, however, another reminder that the public health infrastructure in Africa has been neglected. They tried valiantly to placate, to reassure, and to divert the public's fickle attention back to the scarier infectious epidemics that afflict millions every year.
Amid the hubbub, I was proud to be quoted in Erin Gloria Ryan's new Jezebel piece, "The Paranoid Hypochondriac's Guide to the Ebola Outbreak." Should I be worried that the other folks quoted in the article chose to remain anonymous? Heck no! I'm going to go enjoy my ten seconds of fame, knowing full well the firestorm of corrections and trolling will begin soon. Ten. Nine. Eight...
Education has entered the era of Big Data. The Internet is teeming with stories touting the latest groundbreaking studies on the science of learning and pedagogy. Education journalists are in a race to report these findings as they search for the magic formula that will save America's schools. But while most of this research is methodologically solid, not all of it is ready for immediate deployment in the classroom.
To read the rest of my new article, written with the lovely and talented education writer Jessica Lahey, visit The Atlantic.
I stopped breathing when the syringe filled with bubbles. The resident and I stood silently for a couple of breaths, watching the syringe fill with more pink bubbles each time the patient’s chest filled with air.
“Shit,” said the resident, taking the syringe from my hand. He withdrew the syringe from the vein, and applied pressure with a gloved hand. I watched, my own carotid pulsing at my chin.
A STAT chest x-ray confirmed our worst fears...
To read more, visit my article in the Living Hand medical humanities section of the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
The MERS coronavirus has now spread from the Middle East to home town USA.
Since both US victims of this resurgent respiratory virus - one in Indiana and another in Florida - are healthcare workers, all eyes have turned to nosocomial transmission. In some locales nosocomial transmission has outpaced the former frontrunner for the MERS transmission prize: camel spit.
Proper infection control, therefore, is hugely important. The CDC recommends special airborne infection rooms, masks, eye protection, gowns and gloves. I remember taking these precautions when the SARS epidemic came through town. In some cases, patients were incredibly sick and it was scary; other times folks with SARS had the sniffles and we made a big deal over very little. Let's hope that as we learn more about MERS, the early reports of 30% case fatality will turn into less sobering statistics.
Along the way, it's good that the macho culture of medicine has been changing. When I was in training, it was common and even admirable for doctors to work sick. I remember idolizing a medicine resident who did morning rounds with an IV pole at his side. Yet now we know - how could we not have clued in then?! - that this risks spread of infectious diseases to our fragile patients.
In a nice story just out today titled "Second MERS Case Shows Hospitals Are Ground Zero for MERS," Maggie Fox of CBS News quoted me and others about MERS infection control.
In a new blog post at the HIV-related web site The Body, I recall the last few years with an HIV-positive patient, Steve. Steve and I started out with the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases and delicate discussions of safer sex. Now, Steve is on effective HIV treatment and we talked most recently about his honeymoon plans. It has been really fun to watch Steve grow, and change, and thrive.
DESPITE the intensely personal moments that happen in hospitals, patient privacy can be elusive. Hospitals are multimillion-dollar corporations that look like shopping malls and function like factories. Doctors knock on exam room doors to signal they are about to enter — not to ask permission. The curtain that encircles the hospital bed always lets in a crack of light.
Yet we do expect some degree of privacy in hospitals. We trust doctors with our secrets in part because they take a 2,000-year-old Hippocratic oath to respect our privacy, an oath enforced by laws like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. But sometimes, doctors have to weigh patients’ privacy against their health and safety, and that’s when things get complicated.
My hospital, where I am chairman of the bioethics committee, recently wrestled with the question of where patient and family privacy ends. Nurses in the neonatal intensive care unit (N.I.C.U.) worried that a premature infant, whom I’ll call Rickie to protect his identity, was being harmed by his parents.
Read my full op ed at The New York Times.
As the lights in the auditorium go down, just before I flick on my microphone, I remember what media critic Marshall McLuhan once said about culture: We live “in an electric information environment that is quite as imperceptible to us as water is to fish.”
As a leader of my institution’s curriculum redesign effort, I often speak with departments and even the whole faculty about our plans for the new curriculum. These experiences have made me acutely aware of how well McLuhan’s quote applies to what has been called the “hidden curriculum” in medical education. Medical education, and the culture of medicine in which it occurs, influence personal identity and perception so pervasively that it can be a challenge to talk clearly about how to change the hidden curriculum.
Read the rest of my blog at Health Affairs. It is a response to a very nice article by Liao et al in the January issue of that same journal.
New findings by researchers at the Gladstone Institute of Virology at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) have upended how we understand the pathogenesis of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS).
Enter Warner Greene, a dapper white-haired professor of medicine at UCSF and its Gladstone Institute of Virology. In a feat of scientific hutzpah sure to trigger fits of envy among other scientific heavy-hitters, Greene shattered the existing model of AIDS pathogenesis in two simultaneous groundbreaking articles in the prestigious journals Science and Nature in late December 2013.
Greene’s team made multiple seminal observations. Their key findings were ...
Read my new post at Scientific American guest blogs to learn more
We are now deep into flu season. Forty states are reporting widespread influenza, and the number of deaths is greater thane expected.
Hospitalized patients are among the most vulnerable people in flu season. Immune systems already weakened by kidney failure or another major illness, hospitalized patients contract influenza from loved ones and - most ironically - from hospital workers. From doctors to nurses and beyond, a coughing caregivers can be the worst kind of medicine for vulnerable hospitalized patients.
Should hospital employees be obligated to get a flu shot to protect vulnerable hospitalized patients? Some hospitals - including mine - require employees to get flu shots or else suffer consequences such as mandatory masks, furlough and firing. Is this an unjustified infringement on personal liberty, or a thoughtful way to protect the health of our most vulnerable?
Ethicist Bill Nelson and I explore this controversial issue in a recent issue of Healthcare Executive.
Tim Lahey, MD MMSc
An HIV doc and clinical ethicist, I write about medicine, ethics, and HIV here and in The Atlantic, Scientific American, TheBody.com, Health Affairs blog, The Conversation and The New York Times.
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