Tag Archives: diagnosis

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If it don’t fit, don’t force it

Templates in primary care medicine suck.

Why? The problem with templates in primary care medicine is they focus on getting a specific list of questions answered for something like ear pain or back pain. They miss the weird stuff. They miss the outliers.

I hated the templates when we got our first electronic record in the early 2000s. The doctors who liked computers spent a year picking the system. Then they trained all the clinics for one week and we all went live. One of the biggest problems was that they liked computers and talked the language. We didn’t. We quit asking questions within a week, because when we asked a question it 1. Was a user problem and 2. They treated us like we were stupid and 3. They answered in Geek, which we did not understand.

We quit asking questions. The nurses and I all filed for workman’s comp because our shoulders locked up. Our shoulders hurt. We figured out how to get the stupid thing to work. Every doctor and nurse and PAC and nurse practitioner worked to figure it out on our own.

Two years later, they set up some standards for use. We resisted again, because they gave us orders in Geek and anyhow, we had no respect for them and we didn’t care. Change what we were doing? After no support for two years? Good luck!

It took me two years and three months to get the system to write what I considered a good clinic note. I had contacted an outside specialist three months in and asked how our notes were.

“You want me to be honest?” he said.

“Yes.”

“They suck. They are useless.”

“That’s what I thought.” I went on fighting the system and hating it. I won, eventually. Parts of my note continued to suck, but I figured out how to work around the stupid templates and put in some REAL information.

Now wait, you say, is the template totally useless?

In some situations, like emergency rooms, it may be very useful. It helps keep a harried ER team with four people from a car wreck from missing something. And if you are an ENT, otolaryngologist, you do see a lot of ear and mouth and throat things, so templates may help. But I think they are terrible for primary care.

They are good for billing, though. If you have all the boxes checked, the insurance company pays, and you can move on to the next victim. The insurance companies pay more if you see more people in a day. That is why our administration said, “See people for one thing per visit.”

However, that is not ethical. Say it is a 70 year old diabetic with atrial fibrillation on coumadin with a bladder infection. You cannot just say bladder infection and slap them on sulfa. For one thing sulfa screws up the coumadin and puts them at risk for bleeding. For a second, diabetes can affect kidney function and so can age and you have to adjust antibiotic dose for lower kidney function. For a third, if their glucose levels are out of control, the infection may not be controlled by an antibiotic. It’s not one thing. And the average patient has 4 chronic disorders in a study way back in the early 2000s. That means some people have none, some people have eight or more and most people have 3-5. Hypertension, diabetes, toe fungus, chronic shoulder pain, heart disease, the list goes on and on.

In any visit, I am alert for the things the DON’T fit. One time I am doing a new patient visit for back pain and note that she is hoarse. I bug her about the hoarseness. She admits it is continuous and has been there for two months. I do two referrals, because continuous hoarseness can be laryngeal cancer.

When she returns, she thanks me. She has vocal cord polyps, not cancer, but needs laser surgery. “You didn’t have to do that but you did.” she says. And do I feel good about not ignoring it? The visit went over time, but I’d rather go over time than miss laryngeal cancer, right?

We were taught to let the patient talk. Open ended questions. They’ve done studies that doctors cut people off from telling their stories very very quickly. If you let people talk, sometimes they say something that doesn’t fit the template, and we have to pay attention. Sometimes a comment or a couple comments are the clue, the key, the thing that doesn’t fit. Don’t force it into the template. Pay attention instead.

_______________________

The very serious group of people is a county medical meeting, 2014.

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Practicing Conflict II

Practicing conflict II

In Practicing conflict, I wrote about practicing conflict by arguing different sides of a topic inside my head. I wrote that I don’t fear conflict and have learned to enjoy arguing with myself. I am a physician and physicians argue all the time.

What? No they don’t. Well, the doctor persona does not argue with the patient much. Some doctors give orders to patients, others try to negotiate, some try to convince. But behind the scenes, doctors are more like the Whacky Racer Car with the Cave Guys, running with their feet and hitting each other with clubs.

In residency in Family Practice at OHSU in Portland, Oregon, I start on General Surgery during internship. This is in the early 1990s and there was not much in the way of “disruptive physician” rules. I have to cover Trauma and Plastic Surgery and General Surgery at night on call. The resident is present but I get paged first for patients on the floor. I learn that I should go to all Trauma pages in the emergency room. If I know what is happening with the new Trauma patient, it’s a lot easier to handle the phone calls for more drugs and so forth. Also, the resident is less mean to me.

We attend the Trauma “Grand Rounds”. These are unreassuring to a new intern. A resident presents a trauma patient, giving the history in the accepted formal order. The Faculty Trauma Surgeons interrupt, disagree with management of the patient and yell. They yell at the resident and at each other. The upper level residents yell too, being well trained. The Trauma Surgeons do not agree with each other. They are inflammatory and rude. I am shocked initially: medicine is not a cookbook, is not simple and it appears that it is a controversial mess. It turns out that medicine IS a controversial mess.

There is not as much yelling on the next rotation. At that time Trauma Surgeons yelled more than any other set of doctors that I ran across. They yelled in the ER, at each other, at the staff, at the nurses, at the residents. The culture has changed, I suspect, but that’s how it was then.

I take Advanced Trauma Life Support as a third year resident. The Trauma Surgeons at OHSU helped write the course. They don’t agree with it. On some questions the teaching Surgeon says, “The answer to this question is (c), “ followed by muttering loudly, “though I totally don’t agree with that and I would do (b).” Another Trauma resident or surgeon then might start arguing with him, but they moved on pretty quickly, to teach the current agreed best practices in the book. Which change every few years. Great.

Years later (2009) I join the Mad as Hell Doctors, to go across the US talking about single payer. They are a group from Oregon. Physicians for a National Healthcare Program are a bit cautious with us the first year: we might be whackos. We have an RV with our logo and we have a small fleet of cars and what do you think we do in the cars? We argue. Or discuss. Or whatever you want to call it. We spend the driving dissecting issues and how to present things best and tearing apart the last presentation and rebuilding our ideas. The group does 36 presentations in 24 days. Each presentation takes an hour to set up, two hours to do and another hour to break down and debrief. We get more and more exhausted and cranky and um, well, argumentative, as the trip proceeds. Even though I think of the Whacky Racer Cave Guys running with their feet and bonking each other with clubs, this is the most wonderful group of doctors I have ever been with. A common goal that we all want to get to, discussing and disagreeing on strategy all the way! I feel closer to those physicians in a week then I feel to any of the physicians that I’ve worked with for the last 9 years in my small town. Conflict with a common goal.

Doctors are TRAINED to argue, even with themselves, to document every decision in the chart with reasons why they have reached that decision. And that they have thought about all of the reasons for say, a low potassium, thought of every possible cause and worked their way through testing. The testing always has two strands. One strand is rule out the things that could kill the person NOW, even if rare. The other strand is what is common? You have to think about both at the same time, always. And argue with yourself about which tests should be done, in what order, what is most important, how do you treat the person while awaiting results, and have I missed anything? And if we aren’t sure, we call another doctor, run it by them, wait for them to shoot holes in our logic or to say, no, I can’t think of anything else.

We can deal with conflict. We must deal with conflict. The world is too small not to deal with conflict, with disagreements, with different viewpoints and positions and ideas. If doctors can do it every single day at work, then everyone else can too. Trying to see all the positions and possible diagnoses saves lives in medicine. We need to extrapolate that to everything else. Try to see other positions, try to understand them, to respect them. We can and we must.

Blessings.

Here are the Whacky Racers:

And Madashell Doctors blog: http://madashelldoctors.com/category/uncategorized/page/3/

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: discuss.

The photograph is from my clinic once we had stopped seeing patients and were selling everything. Mordechai was our clinic skeleton, made of plastic, from China. This was in January 2021.

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Autoimmune OCD and my daughter shops my closet

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-021-01700-4

The article is a proposal for diagnostic criteria for autoimmune obsessive compulsive disorder, a relatively rare version of OCD. Important because the treatment has to include searching for infection that triggers the antibody response, which in turn attacks the brain. Antibiotics to treat a “psychiatric” disorder. Mind and body connection, right?

The ironic thing about this new proposed diagnosis is that I do not have obivious OCD in any way, shape or form. It is masked by packrat. Also, my OCD is focused. When I was working, it was focused on patients. My clinic charts were thorough, 100% of the time. I was brutally thorough and wouldn’t skip anything. The result was that I got a reputation for being an amazing diagnostician. Usually it was because I wanted ALL the puzzle pieces and the ones that don’t fit are the ones that interested me. They have to all fit. Either the patient is lying or the diagnosis is not as simple as it appears. Occam’s Razor be damned, people can have more than one illness.

In fact, an article 20 years ago looked at average patient panels and said that the average primary care patient has 4-5 chronic illnesses. Hypertension, diabetes, emphysema, tobacco overuse disorder, alcohol overuse disorder, well, yeah. And then the complex ones had 9 or more complex illnesses. You can’t see the person for one thing, because if the diabetic has a toe infection, you’d better look at their kidney function because the antibiotic dose can kill their kidneys if you don’t adjust it. So do not tell me to see the patient for one thing. Malpractice on the hoof. Completely crazy and evil that administrators tell doctors to do that.

No one looking at my house would ever think I have any OCD. I am not a hoarder (ok, books) but the packrat force is strong in me. My daughter did not inherit that gene. She is a minimalist. However, she has come to appreciate the packrat a little.

This summer she said that her purse is wearing out. As a minimalist she has one purse. I ask, “Would you like to see if I have one that you like?” It so happens that as I was trying to recover from pneumonia, a local garage sale had 20+ year old designer purses for $3 each, because the house was going on the market. Got to get rid of the stuff.

“Yes, please.” says my daughter.

I start with the weird ones that I know she will not want. I get eye rolls. But I am progressing towards the purses that are close to the one she has. At last I produce a small leather purse, the right size, in good shape, and she sits up. “Let me see that one.” Like Eeyore with his popped balloon, putting it in a jar and taking it out, she tries putting her phone and wallet in the purse and taking it out. “Yes, I like this!” She calls it “Shopping mom’s closet.” I think it is delightfully comic. The benefits of a packrat mother.

Back to the Nature article and OCD. The diagnostic criteria are gaining steam. Having watched a conference this summer about Pandas and Pans, mine is mild. Some young people have a version where killer T cells invade the brain and kill neurons. I had a moment of panic when the conference was discussing a case, but then I thought, if I had the neuron killing kind I would be dead or demented by now.

Instead, I’m just a little neurologically unusual.

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how doctors think, a dual pathway

A friend calls today and says that another person is bleeding and yet they have been set up to be seen Monday. Why isn’t this an emergency?

Based on the limited information the friend tells me, I agree with the doctors. It is NOT an emergency and I explain why. It is uncomfortable for the person because it may be cancer. Why is that not an emergency?

Let’s use chest pain in the emergency room as an example. Doctors have two brain tracks that are triggered simultaneously by every patient. The first one is “What could kill this person in the next five minutes?” The second is “What is common?” Common things are common and more likely. In medical school the really rare things are nicknamed zebras. You know there are a lot of horses but you can’t miss the zebra. I suppose that in Africa the common things are zebras and the rare ones are orcas or something like that.

Anyhow, the killers for chest pain are heart attacks, sudden death. But there could also be a dissecting aortic aneurysm, where the largest artery in the body is tearing. That person can bleed to death really really fast and that is a surgical emergency. No doctor wants to miss it. There could be a pulmonary embolism, a clot blocking the lung. Chest pain could be from a cancer. A very rare chest pain is from the valve leaflets in the heart tearing so that the person goes in to flash pulmonary edema. And there is Takayasu’s Arteritis, “broken heart syndrome”, where the heart suddenly balloons in size and again, heart failure ensues. Heart failure is actually pump failure, so fluid backs up in the lungs or the legs or both. It is usually slow but rarely very fast and dramatic. A collapsed lung can also cause a lot of pain. And my list is still not complete, I haven’t mentioned pericarditis or myocarditis or a compression fracture.

The common things do include heart attacks, but also anxiety, musculoskeletal problems, inflamed cartilage of the chest wall, fibromyalgia flares, broken ribs, trauma and other things. I was very puzzled in clinic by a woman with pain on both sides of her lower chest wall. In front but cutting through her chest. I ruled out many things. I thought that it was her diaphragm. I sent her to a rehab doctor for help. The rehab doctor sent her to radiology. She had a compression fracture of her spine and the nerves were sending pain messages on both sides. That was not even on my “differential diagnosis” list, because she had no back pain at all. My list changed that day.

Physicians and nurse practitioners and physicians assistants and registered nurses and licensed practical nurses and medical assistants are all trained to think of this differential diagnosis. We are alerted by the history and have to think down both pathways. Last year working as a temporary doctor, the medical assistant came to me saying, “This patient’s blood pressure is 80/60.” “Is he conscious?” I asked, as I went straight for the room. “Yes, he’s talking.” He WAS talking, which means that he’s gotten to 80/60 slowly or is used to it. His heart rate was fast, up near 120. I immediately had him drink water and keep drinking, as soon as he denied chest pain. The problem was dehydration: he was developmentally delayed and had only had one cup of fluid that day and it was now midafternoon. I spent time explaining that he needed 8 cups each day. Not more than that, because if he had too much fluid, it would lower his sodium and make his muscles weak. Most days he drank 3-4 cups. His chart graphed the problem: some days he had normal blood pressure and a normal heart rate. Other days his blood pressure was below normal and his heart rate was fast, his heart trying to make up for the low level of fluid. Cars don’t do so well when there is almost no oil, do they? His kidneys were affected as well. I asked him to drink the 8 cups a day, discussed the size of the cup (not 8 gallons, please) and then recheck labs in 2 weeks. If his kidneys did not improve, he would need a kidney specialist. It turned out that he had nearly fainted that morning in the waiting room. His group home person admitted that no one had noticed that he really was not drinking fluid. I thought that the patient understood and would try to drink a better amount of fluid.

So back to the person I was called about. Infection has been ruled out. This is blood in the urine. A kidney stone has been ruled out, but there is something in the kidney. This is urgent, but if the person is not bleeding hard, it is not emergent. When there is blood in the urine it does not take very much to turn it red. If there is a lot of blood, that can be an emergency, but from the story I got third person, it’s not very much. The emergency things are ruled out but there is still not a clear diagnosis. Yes, cancer is one of the possibilities but it could also be benign. Now a specialist is needed to figure out the next step and the differential diagnosis, the list of things it could be. They will order tests in the same dual order: what could kill this person quickly and what do we need to rule out as common? People often can be very anxious during this period, which is normal. The person says, “I don’t care what it ISN’T, I want to know what it IS.” But sometimes it is a zebra and it takes a while to get to that specific test.

Another example is a woman that I sent to the eye doctor. The optometrist thought it was something rare and bad. He sent her to the opthamologist, who ruled out the first thing, but thought it was something else rare and bad. He sent her to a retinal specialist. The retinal specialist ruled out the second rare and bad thing and said, “No, you have something very rare that is benign.” My patient said, “I have three diagnoses. Who do I believe?” I replied, “No, you have one. The optometrist knew it was unusual and sent you to an eye doctor. The eye doctor know it was unusual and sent you to an even more specialized eye doctor (a “sub specialist”. We keep them in basements.) Now you have a diagnosis. It was a scary process, but I think you should focus on the third opinion because hey, she said it’s benign and it won’t hurt you! That is the best outcome!” She thought about it and agreed. The process was frightening but the conclusion could not have been better.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: disquieting.

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Update on whatever it is I have

I had the heart echocardiogram bubble study. Normal. I really really did not like having the mix of blood, saline and AIR injected and I COULD FEEL IT. My logical brain knew it was going into a vein, but my emotional brain kept yelling “Air embolisms kill people!” Yes, but that is arterial. My emotional brain did not care. Anyhow, it was fine.

Saw the cardiologist who said he can understand why I feel PTSD going into my local hospital. He says I should not need oxygen at age 60 with no smoking. He says “Not your heart.” Yeah, duuuude, I know. He suggests I go to the Mayo Clinic. I agree.

Meanwhile, my primary sent a referral to rheumatology to have me seen at Swedish to confirm chronic fatigue. This is to keep the stupid disability off my back. Swedish rheum doesn’t call me. I ask my primary’s office. Swedish STILL doesn’t call me. I call them, as follows.

“Hi, I was referred to Swedish rheum and I have not been called.”

“Name, serial number, date of birth, length of little toe. Ah, we just received the referral yesterday.”

“Um, I don’t think so. I was referred over a month ago.”

“Uh, oh,” scrabble noises, “Oh, uh, we got a referral in December. We were not taking new patients in December.”

“When did you start taking new patients?”

“Oh, um.”

“When did you start taking new patients?”

“Oh, uh, January. But we only took the ones that called us, because after they call, we then review the notes.”

“So you ignored the referral until I call? How am I supposed to know that?”

“Oh, uh, we will expedite your referral. Maybe even today.”

So THEN I get a message from my primary that they have REFUSED the referral. Great.

Meanwhile I read the cardiologist’s note, which pisses me off. “We will refer you to Mayo Clinic since you have unexplained hypoxia and you think you have PANS.”

I send my primary a very pissed off note saying, could we please phrase this as “a psychiatrist suggested PANS in 2012 and while no one likes this diagnosis, no one else has suggested an overarching diagnosis since that time in spite of her seeing four pulmonologists, neurology, cardiology, infectious disease, four psychiatrists, allergy/asthma, and immunology”. Saying “the patient thinks she has PANS” automatically labels me as crazy and obsessed.

So, it seems I should write a book, about how the medical communities treat patients, including a fellow physician, horribly. Of those doctors, three have treated me with respect and were grown up enough to say, “We don’t know.” The neurologist, the infectious disease doc and the present pulmonologist. All the rest are dismissive and disrespectful. Oh, and the one psychiatrist, but the next one says, “I don’t believe in PANDAS.” I stare at him in disbelief, thinking “they are animals related to raccoons that live in China, you moron”. I did not even know it was controversial until that moment. Holy PANDAS, Batman.

My primary has suggested I write to the Mayo Clinic myself, and I am going to. Because the present people aren’t listening, except my pulmonologist and she is short staffed and looks like death warmed over post call every time I see her.

So it’s all annoying as hell. The cardiologist seemed pretty nice, but damn, he put the same damn rumor down about me self diagnosing. Most of the doctors apparently think I might be a tolerable person if they could just drug me with psych drugs. And from what I have seen, there are many patients who are in this situation.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: WAR.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30724577/

Click to access MECFS_KeyFacts.pdf

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Thoughts on the update from ICD 9 to ICD 10 

I would be very interested in a tune for this poem. 

This poem was rejected by JAMA, the Journal of the 
American Medical Association. Of course, the American 
Medical Association writes the codes. I do not look 
forward to going from the present 14,000 diagnosis 
codes to 42,000. I think it's just another way for 
insurance to delay and refuse to pay physicians. I 
think our country now has a business ethic of "screw 
anyone you can" and I don't like it. 

Thoughts on the update from ICD 9 to ICD 10


They say ICD 9
Just isn't so fine
Not enough codes to choose
To keep us fungking confused

They say ICD 9
Just isn't so fine
The rest of the world
Uses ICD 10, word

But they are liar liar liars
Pants on fire fire
Noses as long as telephone wires

They are liar liar liars
Fungk ICD 10
And let me tell you fungk them
Fungk starting over again

ICD 9 is now 34
Oh what a bore
They say it's too old
I'm older and gold

They say engage a team
Establish a plan
Get focused training
Learn that sh-t from the man

They say what does your practice
See and learn just those codes
Fungk ya'll but wise
I see everything that goes

I do family practice
I'm a rural doctor
The point of the codes
Is insurance don't pay, suckers

They say ICD 9
Just isn't so fine
The rest of the world
Uses ICD 10, word

But they are liars liars liars
Pants on fire fire
Noses as long as telephone wires

I know my ICD 9
Forwards and backwards, up and down
I can code pregnant
by four circus clowns

I can code pulmonary
embolus past
I can code gerbil inserted in the a--

ICD 10
is starting again
Code left or right or other
Those sh-ts would fungk your mother

ICD 10 is starting again
Code where it happened
Or insurance won't pay
Fungkers make my day

They say champion the change
I say channel the rage
Take a book from my page
Incinerate the fungking change

Fungk ICD 10
Fungk ICD 10
Fungk ICD 10
Fungk it again.