Medical Misnomers

English is a funny language, an amalgam of many other languages, and always in evolution. Daily, we use words that make no sense, without even noticing it. Most of these misnomers made sense originally, and the words have hung on, even after our knowledge, or the...

Things We Believe That Probably Aren’t True

Mark Twain said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. “ Let’s have a romp through some beliefs that have NO science to back them up. Burping babies- If you’ve ever been a parent or a babysitter,...

TV Medicine

Clearly, four years of college, four years of medical school and three years of pediatric residency wasn’t a complete medical education. There are so many things I didn’t know until I started watching action-packed TV shows. Especially the ones with SWAT teams,...

Christmas in a Children’s Hospital

In December, the questions parents ask in the hospital are different. Instead of “Will my child be OK?”, we pediatric hospitalists hear: “We have plane tickets to go skiing for Christmas. Will he be well by then?” “She’ll be home for Christmas, right? We’ve never been...

Vacation in a Tuberculosis Sanitarium

We love to stay at historic places when we travel, and so I booked a few nights at Birch Lodge during our recent vacation to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. All I knew was that it was over 100 years old, on the National Registry of Historic Places, and looked beautiful...

On Call with a Non-Doctor Husband

I’d already been in practice for several years when I married John. I had had years of training in night call, during med school, internship, residency, and private practice. He, poor guy, had not. So, it was a new world to him. It was in the days before call centers...