Category: Health care

Convalescence: the forgotten phase of illness recovery

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 12 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas    ♥  @HeartSisters

I love the work of U.K. philosopher Alain de Botton, an explorer of the  ‘philosophy of everyday life.’  He once wrote:

“People can accept you sick or well. What’s lacking is patience for the convalescent.”  

Convalescence. It’s the gradual return to health while you still need time to recover from illness or medical treatment, usually by resting. For patients, it’s that fuzzy grey area in between feeling acutely ill and feeling 100% healthy again. The term comes from the Latin convalescere: “to grow fully strong.”

Most garden-variety convalescence is mercifully short. After spending a few days in bed with a flu bug, for example, you might feel a bit weak or shaky for a while. Not exactly sick anymore, but not yet 100%. Other forms of convalescence, however, may take weeks, months or even years of recuperation. And with some chronic and progressive disease diagnoses, everyday life can start feeling like one long endless period of convalescence – with good health merely a dim memory.  The difference: unlike the historical practice of viewing convalescence as a distinctly separate and important stage of illness recovery, today’s convalescents may simply feel like they’re being forced to very quickly adjust to the “new normal” of life. Continue reading “Convalescence: the forgotten phase of illness recovery” →

Misdiagnosis: is it what doctors think, or HOW they think?

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 19 Comments

As a heart attack survivor who was sent home from the E.R. with a misdiagnosis of indigestion despite presenting with textbook symptoms (central chest pain, nausea, sweating and pain radiating down my left arm), I’m pretty interested in the subject of why women are far more likely to be misdiagnosed in mid-heart attack compared to our male counterparts.

Dr. Pat Croskerry is pretty interested in the subject of misdiagnosis, too. He’s an Emergency Medicine physician, a patient safety expert and director of the critical thinking program at Dalhousie University Medical School in Halifax. In fact, he implemented at Dal the first undergraduate course in Canada about medical error in clinical decision-making, specifically around why and how physicians make diagnostic errors. Every year, he gives a deceptively simple critical thinking quiz to his incoming first-year med students.*

So here’s your chance to practice thinking like a doctor. Try answering these yourself, but as Dr. Croskerry advises, don’t think too hard. If you were an Emergency Department physician, paramedic or first responder, he warns, you’d have only seconds to size things up and make a decision. Don’t read ahead to peek at the answers! Now, here are your questions:   Continue reading “Misdiagnosis: is it what doctors think, or HOW they think?” →

When drugs that help turn into drugs that harm

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 13 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas   ♥  @HeartSisters

nutrient-drug-interactions-2129I’ve been thinking an awful lot about drug safety lately, ever since I’ve been camped out at the hospital bedside of a dear friend.  She’s been hospitalized with a severe drug toxicity reaction to a commonly-prescribed medication she’d been newly taking for the past month. And when I say “severe”, I mean you cannot even imagine the horrific symptoms she has suffered day after day after day, week after week, while the pharmaceutical culprit, excruciatingly slowly, clears her system.
 Continue reading “When drugs that help turn into drugs that harm” →

The five questions your doctor is probably not asking you

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 10 Comments

five questionsWhen I spoke at the eHITS2014 Vancouver conference on health and technology recently, I was happy to share with the mostly-physician audience my enthusiasm for a new health care initiative called Flip The Clinic.  Have you heard about it yet?

This Robert Woods Johnson Foundation project asks our health care providers to start thinking seriously “beyond the walls” about the way medicine is practiced during a doctor’s visit. Continue reading “The five questions your doctor is probably not asking you” →