The following was taken from an article written by Dr. Megan Lewis with the above title. This is what happens when doctors become coders for the apparatchiks of Medicare and the insurance companies. Imagine going to your favorite restaurant. You are greeted at the...

There is an old joke in medicine that goes: on graduation day the dean of the medical school tells the new doctors that half of what they learned will turn out to be wrong – we just don’t know which half. Unfortunately, it turns out to be more than half. In 2005 Dr....

There are fat soluble vitamins (ADEK), and water soluble vitamins (B and C). Generally the water soluble vitamins are safe as we process out what we do not need through the kidneys. On the other hand, we must be careful with fat soluble vitamins as they are stored in...

Last year the Institute of Internal Medicine came out with a report that said you can save your money on daily multivitamins as they do not work to prevent morbidity or mortality; since then I have noticed an enormous increase in 1V commercials for multivitamins....

I highly recommend Dr. Gilbert Welch’s book “Over-diagnosed: making people sick in the pursuit of health.” In it he talks about patients getting caught up in a cascade of overdiagnosis. I once had a patient who went to the ER for an upper respiratory infection. A...

I completed my family practice residency in Latrobe in 1999. In my last year our practice admitted three cases of rheumatic fever to hospital. I was the senior resident on two of those cases. Rheumatic fever comes from an untreated strep throat infection. The bacteria...