Ataxia and Frailty When I was a safety officer at Dartmouth, I did a fair amount of work on surgical/patient safety.... a big focus of ours was frailty-what we found was patients who tested positive had longer length of stay in the hospital and discharge to non-home...

When I was a practicing surgeon, there was a mystery. An 80-year-old patient does well after surgery but a 60-year-old doesn't.... why is that? One of the answers is frailty Frailty is not merely aging or losing weight -it's a defined medical condition. The official...

Psychological Safety (for Surgical Safety During surgery, anyone (nurses, techs, other doctors) should be able to say stop to the surgeon and he/she would stop to hear what they had to say. This is concept of psychological safety. In the past, one of my...

Unfortunately, the pandemic COVID-19 posed some challenges around safety and also some process changes had to be implemented (e.g. confirming bed availability after the surgery-step 6). Patients get tested to determine their status (step 1). Most surgical teams have a...

I did a lot of work on surgical safety. What I discovered over time is everyone-the surgeon, anesthesiologist, nurses techs., all have a role to play in performing safe surgery. What van you do as a patient if you are scheduled for elective surgery? Talk to your...

Technology in healthcare Technology in healthcare systems (hospitals, groups) have not been the solution to healthcare’s ills. As wee know, the use of technology has made a sea-change in other industries- A good example is banking. Most routine banking activities can...

    I was very glad that I scheduled and got the vaccine against COVID. Unfortunately, I did not see a single minority/Latino individual over the half-hour I spent at the site, Fundamentally, African- Americans are worried about the safety- there is a video...

Ataxia management Much like other chronic illnesses successfully managing genetic cerebellar ataxia requires some out-of-pocket expenses that insurance does not cover. For example, Medicare does not pay for a full-on physical therapy treatment; so patients sommetimes...

 emigrated to the USA in 1982. to Maryland, USAI Going into a brand new high school was challenging to say the least. I went to the University of Maryland for undergrad studies. I stayed in the Mayland system. I attended med school at UMAB. After residency, I did some...

Hope this is a timely posting-there are some subtle differences between the cold, influenza and COVID-19. Hope this helps everyone   It used to be that you’d start to get the sniffles or wake up with a fever and body aches and you had a pretty good idea whether it was...

This blog post serves two purposes...it is my daily COVID update and inform you about clinical trials, what they involve (since it is in the news Phase 0 Phase 0 trials are the first clinical trials done among people. They aim to learn how a drug is processed in the...

Steroid use in ENT- -COVID-19 challenges We use steroids quite a bit in ENT- both local and systemic. But COVID-19 poses a unique challenge because most systemic steroids suppress the immune system. But there are instances when their use is clearly indicated-so a...