Today the NY Times printed a piece pokes fun at, and highlights the dangers of, the new habit of texting-while-walking:
This summer, the American College of Emergency Room Physicians released a statement expressing concern about the issue, citing a Chicago doctor who was seeing a lot of face, chin, eye and mouth injuries among young people who reported texting and tumbling.
Hmm... I'm a member of ACEP, but I've never heard of ACERP. Is it some rival organization of emergency physicians whose practice is confined to four walls? Or, in its rush to condemn new technologies that enable communication on-the-go, has the New York Times abandoned the traditional practices of editing and fact-checking? 

More play time than money

Much has been written about health care reform, but there's something that's gone unremarked upon, as far as I know:

I don't think I've ever seen this much attention to legislative procedure.

And it's kind of remarkable, really -- just look at some of these mainstream news stories from Slate or the New York Times. And it's been like this for months now.

I remember briefly some discussion of the constitutionality of filibustering in relation to Bush judicial nominees a few years back -- the trivia around the nuclear option and all. But in all the big legislative debates I can recall, from the Brady Bill to NAFTA, DMCA, McCain-Feingold, the PATRIOT Act, Medicare part D and TARP, I don't think there's been such coverage of rival committees, proposed amendments and procedural maneuvers. I can't recall a time when so many different senators and representatives were regularly featured in the news.

There's probably some way to measure this -- counting mentions of the term "cloture" in the news over the years, perhaps, or determining the frequency of senators' names appearing in print.

Who knows? Maybe I'm just paying more attention this time around. But I'd bet the proliferation of punditry, speculative markets and blogs has spawned more detailed reporting.

It's not at all clear whether this increased reporting on legislative procedure translates to a populace more informed on policy options, although I'd wager that's the case. And while I'm sure there are still plenty of back-room deals and shady lobbyist rewrites, this increased public engagement and scrutiny of the legislative process has got to be a good thing, overall.

What I'm wondering is: What would have happened to all the vitriol over healthcare reform, if we didn't have all these frequent, detailed updates? Would we have seen less heated rhetoric, or could more have been possible?

Protect your language




While you're deciding

I took my board exam this week, and I think I liked it.

Which is not to say it was easy, or even altogether fair. And though I felt a little bit better upon finishing than these folks, I could be grossly deluded in my estimation of the number and trickiness of truly tough questions.

But there was a point in the exam, three or four hours into it, when I was overcome by the sheer variety of extraordinary patient presentations -- the environmental catastrophes, bizarre overdoses and bites from creatures great and small. Overcome, not because I've never seen patients like this (for the most part, I haven't) or because I didn't know how to diagnose and manage them (I think I did), but really because these questions underscored what an amazing specialty I've chosen.

I like that my specialty board expects a mastery of emergency topics on which there's no consultant to turn to, and that they expect me to be able to work in any part of the US -- places where snake bites or diving complications or altitude sickness is more common than my neck of the woods. Too often in emergency departments, we get caught up in managing patients with existing, complex diagnoses -- transplants, hereditary disorders, and the like -- who present with a list of specialists to notify. It's nice that our board has crafted a curriculum and though their exam, reminds us that at least occasionally, our medical input is indispensable. 

Favorite parts of the exam (that I can mention in an open forum):
  • Taking the exam at 500 Fifth Avenue, an overlooked gem of a New York City skyscraper. In any other city, this 60-story art deco tower would be celebrated, iconic. In midtown, however, people's attention is drawn to the nearby New York Public Library and Grand Central Terminal, just a block or two away, as well as the other towers along 42nd Street -- Chrysler, Grace, and the new Bank of America building. But 500 Fifth is worth a closer look, if only to draw a comparison to the tower its developers built immediately after, a little farther down the street.
  • I recently co-authored a short "chapter" in a review book about a rarely-encountered (by me, at least) ophthalmological emergency. It was on the board exam!
  • When you walk into this Pearson testing center, you take a number -- and that's the testing station you're to which you're assigned. I took Number 14. The lady behind the desk called Number 12 to snap his picture and get him registered. Then, she called on me. When I jokingly asked what happened to Number 13, she replied something to the effect of: "You doctors may not be superstitious but we know better than give someone that number."
Of course, I do have a few gripes:
  • For an electronic exam that's criterion-referenced (not curved), it seems odd that it'll take so long (usually 40-50 days, I think they reserve the right to take 90 days) to score it. 
  • A huge fraction of the exam -- by some estimates, a third of all questions -- are experimental. I recognize the examiners' need to know how challenging or fair new questions are before making them "count" -- but when so much of a test is, well, untested, the examination process becomes an exercise in confusion and frustration, and it becomes impossible to gauge one's performance. By the time the scores come, months later, an opportunity for constructive feedback has been lost. Maybe this is ABEM's way of simulating the actual practice of emergency medicine? As a recent grad, let me suggest: why not experiment more on the residents? There's a lot of them, and their inservice exam is free (yes, I spent nearly $1000 for the privilege of taking a largely experimental test -- shouldn't it be the other way around? Maybe ABEM could offset some of the cost by letting us choose how much of the exam day will be spent giving them data on future questions).
  • For a specialty that prides itself on recognizing zebras and considering the life-threats for even the most benign presentations, the exam has an unseemly predilection for "most common" questions -- the most common bug responsible for a given infection, the most common age group affected by a given disorder, etc. I know some demographic information and context is important, but these questions arise so often, it's almost as though the board doesn't want us to use broad-spectrum antibiotics, for instance, or work up younger adults with chest pain.

All in all, though, the exam experience was ok -- and not as bad as I was dreading. I just hope I don't have to repeat it.

Look at my circumstance




Can Web 2.0 improve this post?

If you were curious about some of the Web 2.0 sites or services I mentioned today in my talk, links are available below:

Here are the EM ultrasound resources I mentioned:

A peak you reach

Friends visiting New York City this summer keep asking if it's safe. As in, will they be catching and suffering from novel H1N1 (swine) flu.

I like to think my friends are pretty sharp, discerning folks (after all, they're choosing my company) so I have to attribute these inappropriate questions to a wider problem.

For reference, here's the latest though probably not last NYC DOH guideline on H1N1, which notes about 900 hospitalization and 45 deaths in H1N1+ patients over three months. About three quarters of these patients had at least one risk factor such as existing lung disease.

This deaths and hospitalizations are concerning, naturally, but some perspective is in order: as many as half a million New Yorkers have been infected with H1N1, and this spring in US cities, we actually saw a smaller fraction of deaths due to infectious respiratory illness, compared with 2008. Also, for reference, based on data from a few years ago, I'm guessing that any given three month period, there are between 10,000 to 15,000 deaths in New York City.

So why were ED's swamped in May? Why are my friends still afraid to come to NYC? Dr. David Newman has some thoughts in EPMonthly:

...with constant messages of swine flu lethality on the nightly news, it is little surprise that ED’s in New York City, departments in a chronic state of over-crowding and crisis, were soon bursting at the seams with record volumes. In some institutions daily ED volumes doubled, as EP’s worked through third-world conditions of extreme crowding, questionable hygiene, extended wait times, and swarms of infectious, coughing congregates all within arm’s reach of each other.

The impact is clear: lives were lost. High quality studies have shown repeatedly that when ED’s experience crowding patients in need of rapid, high intensity care are identified later, treated more slowly, and devoted fewer resources. Mortality goes up during crowding in virtually every condition that has been studied, including MI, sepsis, and others. The irony is stark: Once a critical mass is reached, the more that come to be saved, the fewer we can save.

...The overall management of information during the swine flu of 2009, despite some progress in our access to information, was misguided and dangerous. Frantic media outlets drove a nation to fabricated fears, while state-level institutions not only failed to contain or counteract these messages, but also used expensive, fruitless, prescription-only pills, available to most only in their local ED’s, as a means of false comfort. Instead of using honest information to provide safety, comfort and education, the approach created panic, cost money and resources, and took lives.

All of this was preventable and is reversible for the future. There is no reason why the media cannot be recruited into the information dissemination process...

Unfortunately, there is a good reason why: Responsibly framing public health risks is no longer a role that suits traditional media. They've decided it's just not in their interest.

I remarked on this years ago with West Nile virus, which never will never kill as many as, say, food poisoning or swimming pool accidents.

There are many factors driving the public appetite for health risk information -- and that's understandable. I think it's even ok for news organizations to shuffle around reporting to some extent, to satiate those desires.

But what happened in NYC this spring was media malpractice -- night after night, opportunities to put the risks of swine flu in perspective were passed up for breathless reporting. I recall one occasional, a phalanx of reporters were camped outside a hospital I worked at, providing next to no detail about an infant who died it respiratory distress. It turns out this child did not have H1N1, but communicating that was not a priority -- by the next day the lead story was ED's are overcrowded and schools are closing.

EPMonthly ran a nice sidebar from Dr. Jim Augustine, enumerating the ways in which ED docs can engage the media to get the right message out.

But I'm more encouraged by approaches to bypass traditional media and reach patients directly. Yesterday I heard some encouraging news from the CDC: their emergency twitter feed has over 500,000 followers. Millions saw their videos. This is amazing reach, for public health communication.

It wasn't enough to help ED's this spring. But individual hospitals and the CDC is ramping up their use of social media, even as traditional news sources decline in influence. It's really the first good viral news I've heard in a while.

Under my skin, redux

Here's a followup to that recent post about the frustrations involved with patient-reported allergies.

Somehow I missed this before now, but a group from Cincinnati actually started testing patients who reported penicillin allergies... in the ED!

Our results are supportive of the feasibility of conducting penicillin skin testing in the ED and demonstrate the potential influence of conducting skin testing in the ED. The rate of false-positive reports of penicillin allergy in our patient population was high: more than 90% of patients reporting a penicillin allergy did not have a positive skin test result. These findings are consistent with previous reports from other non-ED patient populations...

...The introduction of penicillin skin testing to the ED environment could help decrease the overuse of broad-spectrum antibiotics in the ED...

It took little time to train the ED docs to administer this common skin test used in clinics, and results were available withing 30 minutes. No special background or skills were required to perform this trial -- it's a great example of tackling frustrating problems with straightforward research design.

A small step






Meeting in the aisle

I have a lot of ways to save or share web pages of interest. There's Evernote, ReadItLater, and good old bookmarks. Plus, bookmarklets make Twittering a page easy, and Note in Reader lets you now star, share or 'like' any page.

With so many ways of highlighting good content, it's kind of sad that I rarely go back to look at the material I select, tag, and archive.

But there was a page I kept coming back to, after I saw it online over the weekend. It's a transcript of an interview between an ex-health insurance exec and Bill Moyers.

I've excerpted just a tiny bit and rearranged it a little here, but it's really excellent and deserves a full read (or watching) if you have the time. via Metafilter.


BILL MOYERS: So you drove there?





BILL MOYERS: What did you think?







WENDELL POTTER: ...there's a measure of profitability that investors look to, and it's called a medical loss ratio. And it's unique to the health insurance industry. And by medical loss ratio, I mean that it's a measure that tells investors or anyone else how much of a premium dollar is used by the insurance company to actually pay medical claims. And that has been shrinking, over the years, since the industry's been dominated by, or become dominated by for-profit insurance companies. Back in the early '90s, or back during the time that the Clinton plan was being debated, 95 cents out of every dollar was sent, you know, on average was used by the insurance companies to pay claims. Last year, it was down to just slightly above 80 percent.

So, investors want that to keep shrinking. And if they see that an insurance company has not done what they think meets their expectations with the medical loss ratio, they'll punish them. Investors will start leaving in droves.

I've seen a company stock price fall 20 percent in a single day, when it did not meet Wall Street's expectations with this medical loss ratio.

For example, if one company's medical loss ratio was 77.9 percent, for example, in one quarter, and the next quarter, it was 78.2 percent. It seems like a small movement. But investors will think that's ridiculous. And it's horrible.

BILL MOYERS: That they're spending more money for medical claims.


BILL MOYERS: And less money on profits?

WENDELL POTTER: Exactly. And they think that this company has not done a good job of managing medical expenses. It has not denied enough claims. It has not kicked enough people off the rolls. And that's what-- that is what happens, what these companies do, to make sure that they satisfy Wall Street's expectations with the medical loss ratio.


WENDELL POTTER: Right. Right. And they're Democrats. And my executives wanted to meet with — and when I say my, the people I used to work for--


WENDELL POTTER: Yeah, wanted to meet with Hillary Clinton, when she was still in the Senate and still a candidate for president. Well, that's hard to do. That's hard to pull off, but she did. That just shows you that you can, through the relationships that are formed and that the insurance industry pays for, by hiring these lobbyists, you can your foot in the door. You can get your messages across to these people, in ways that the average American couldn't possibly.

BILL MOYERS: So it's money that can buy access to have their arguments heard, right?

WENDELL POTTER: That's right.

BILL MOYERS: When ordinary citizens cannot be heard.

WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely right. It's the way the American system has evolved, the political system. But it does offend me, that the vested special interests, who are so profitable and so powerful, are able to influence public policy in the way that they have, and the way that they've done over the years. And the insurance industry has been one of the most successful, in beating back any kinds of legislation that would hinder or affect the profitability of the companies.

BILL MOYERS: Why is public insurance, a public option, so fiercely opposed by the industry?


BILL MOYERS: Compared to the industry's--

WENDELL POTTER: They spend about 20 cents of every premium dollar on overhead, which is administrative expense or profit...

So, yeah. I don't usually share or post much on healthcare reform. There's a lot of stakeholders in US healthcare, they make a lot of good points, and it's difficult for me to reconcile the proposals and theory with the forces at work in the emergency department. Plus, the risk of alienating some prospective employer with my forever-googlable opinions always seemed to outweigh the benefit of trying to persuade some anonymous readers.

But I was interested in what Wendell Potter had to say. I know, he's got a new job and a blog and therefore, undoubtedly, an agenda of his own. Maybe it's just his skill in PR but he seemed like an honest guy, and that's something I've been looking for in this debate for a long time.

Today, some other bloggers head to DC to discuss healthcare reform -- Dr. Val, Dr. Rob, Dr. Wes, Kevin MD, Emergiblog, Kerri and others.

I've read these people's words for years. Interviewed them all for Medscape. Some, I've met in person. One, I almost met, but my hospital caught fire, and then I recovered his iPod and earned a llama.

Yes, many of them have forged ties to industry and agencies. And many of them are advancing an agenda of their own, or at the very least, a podcast. But unlike the Potters and Moores and Becks of the world, well, I know these folks, and they seem like honest and good people. Even the guy giving out the llamas. So I recommend you all listen to them, and bookmark Better Health, and retweet, and Note in Reader, and save to Evernote, and whatever else you do with thoughtful material.

Update: The #patientsfirst hash will get you the twitterfeed of the event. A helpful blogger has generated this pdf transcript of the conversation.

To leave me here on shaky ground

So, five years ago, I wondered if the delays in approving, and obstacles in administering, drugs like clozapine (Clozaril) could actually be used to hold parties liable for deaths that occurred while deserving patients weren't getting their meds.

This was kind of a thought exercise, as I understand it would be extremely difficult to measure. But I thought the notion of holding administrators, bureaucrats and lawyers as accountable for their decisions as physicians was one worth exploring.

So I was intrigued to reports of a new study in the Lancet that started like this:

"Thousands of people with schizophrenia worldwide could have been saved if doctors had prescribed them the anti-psychotic drug clozapine, a new study says."


This was the largest study yet to look look at mortality and antipsychotic use. The authors' aim was to examine the mortality gap between the general population and those with schizophrenia, on or off meds. The accompanying editorial phrased the study's findings succinctly:

"Tiihonen and co-workers address a crucial question—to what extent do second-generation antipsychotic drugs contribute to excess mortality in people with schizophrenia? This question has loomed large since reports of raised risk of weight gain and diabetes associated with some of these drugs. Even the earliest studies of weight gain and incident diabetes suggested substantial heterogeneity across second-generation antipsychotics for adverse metabolic effects. Subsequently, large clinical trials, including the CATIE study, have confirmed that different drugs have different metabolic liabilities. Now, differences in mortality also seem to exist between drugs. In today's study, current use of quetiapine was associated with the highest risk of death, with a hazard ratio of 1·41 (95% CI 1·09–1·82) compared with current use of perphenazine. Current use of risperidone was also associated with a (34%) increased risk of death, compared with current use of perphenazine.

Analyses of cumulative use of antipsychotics did not show an increase in cardiovascular mortality in patients taking olanzapine and clozapine over the 11-year study. This finding is surprising in view of the substantial evidence of heightened cardiovascular risk associated with these two drugs. Clozapine was, in fact, associated with a much lower risk of death than was any other antipsychotic treatment, and a substantially lower risk of suicide than with any other medication. Even though people with clinically significant medical comorbidities might be excluded from clozapine treatment and the eventual burden of cardiovascular mortality could take decades to emerge fully, this finding is still striking. Furthermore, these results mean that the reports of under-use of clozapine in African–American patients with schizophrenia are of even greater concern."

The authors make a suggestion:

"...our results raise the issue of whether clozapine should be used as a first-line treatment, because it seems to be the safest antipsychotic in terms of mortality and it is also the most effective.

However, clozapine is inexpensive, and hence it is unprofitable for the pharmaceutical industry to market compared with other second-generation antipsychotic drugs. Additionally, monitoring schedules are a drawback that would be encountered with heightened use of clozapine,and physicians and other hospital staff might therefore be reluctant to initiate clozapine treatment. However, clozapine is associated with a lower discontinuation rates than is any other antipsychotic, and monitoring is not likely to be a major difficulty for patients after the initiation of treatment."

So, after all these years, even with the much-emphasized risk of agranulocytosis and weight gain, clozapine is the safest atypical antipsychotic? At least, in Finland? I'm no psychiatrist, and the only time I order atypicals are when I'm caring for boarded patients already taking these drugs. The docs over at Furious Seasons seem appropriately skeptical.

Still, it's interesting that the media is making this leap, and framing the study in terms of 'lives that could have been saved' -- a step the authors and editorialists weren't willing to take, and one that I don't recall seeing during the news from, say, the WHI hormone replacement reversal. It's an interesting way to frame results because, unlike 'number needed to treat' or 'likelihood ratios,' 'lives that could have been saved' implies liability -- not just for doctors but for bureaucrats and drug marketers. It's a metric that lends itself well to ... thought exercises.

Via @PharmaGuy (forum post)

Under my skin

There's a satisfying post on WhiteCoat where he rants against patient-reported allergies. A sample:

When I ask patients about their medical allergies, more often than not patients suffer from at least one. During a recent shift, I had 17 people who told me that they had medication allergies. When someone has an allergy, I always ask what the allergic reaction is. The responses I received included the following:

* Seven people had allergies to various medications (most often penicillin) because their parents told them they had a reaction as a child. They didn’t know what the reaction was, but they have never taken the medication since.

* Four people had nausea and vomiting with medications that typically cause nausea and vomiting as one of their side effects...

He's right -- a lot of people have unwarranted concerns about mild or entirely predictable reactions, and sometimes this can be frustrating on a busy shift. But I also like the commenter who wrote:

I’m not sure how you think the patient is supposed to know which things actually require medical attention, especially when doctors and nurses refuse to give any guidelines over the phone. 'Come on in, and if you aren’t seriously ill, then we can make fun of you on the blog tomorrow.'

Patient perceptions of allergies is a subset of a larger issue facing all of emergency medicine -- patient perception of disease. We don't expect patients to triage themselves, or figure out which symptoms are worrisome and which are benign. That's our job. I try to look at proper allergy reporting as another opportunity for patient education (my favorite is explaining why someone can't be allergic to the iodine atom).

More importantly, from the informatics perspective, allergy reporting is a big frustration as well (and one we can actually do something about, ourselves). Patient-reported allergies find their way into every EMR, and trigger the most inane alerts and stops, forever. If a patient reported vomiting once after codeine, every subsequent doctor who sees this patient will have to jump through electronic alert hoops just to order IV morphine. It doesn't matter if the patient is taking oxycontin and wears three fentanyl patches. The same goes for antibiotics -- I think most lay folks would be surprised that we have to wrestle, years later, with the inherited family warning of about penicillin reactions, even when ordering a 4th-generation cephalosporin with essentially no cross-reactivity...

There's no intelligence built into the system, yet, I think because everyone's afraid that if a patient has a bad outcome because that 14th medication alert was eliminated, they'd be liable. This line of thinking ignores the notion that bad outcomes are probably happening because there are so many useless alerts, they all tend to be ignored.

Someone told me recently (perhaps it was Dr. Reider?) that non-clinical folks involved in setting up electronic health information exchanges thought that communicated allergies to new providers would be the top priority, and were surprised when physicians considered allergies to be less important than, say, recent EKG's, imaging, current med lists, and the like.

I wonder if this attitude toward allergy records is because we don't think most allergies are that serious, because we can most often treat whatever arises... or because we're overcome with alert fatigue.

Whatever the reason, there's no doubt in my mind that if we had an intelligent, efficient system to process patient-generated allergy reports, we'd be less frustrated with this information, and more sympathetic to the patient's concerns.

Movin' on up

Congratulations to Drs. Graham Walker and Liam Yore, who've made the leap from home-grown bloggers to big-time, institutional blogging over at ACEP's The Central Line.

Also, an excellent development in the other direction: Longtime columnist for ACEP News, Dr. Michelle Lin, now has her own blog: Academic Life in Emergency Medicine. She's providing DVD-like bonus material behind each new Tricks of the Trade column, and also describing her experiences balancing teaching, research and clinical responsibilities.

And bonus: The Examining Room of Dr. Charles is back open for business!

Sleep to Dream

I enjoyed NYC Dr. Kent Sepkowitz's column in Slate the other day -- Paging Dr. Feelgood -- where he recaps the careers of some celebrity docs and tries to imagine the pathway to enabling addicts. Key part:

In a strange way, I actually stand in awe of these guys. I have taken care of a few celebs in my career, and for me it was an awful experience. If you fuck it up, you're toast. Once I took care of a very important person, a person you have heard of and are very interested in, someone you would be shocked to know had the problem—asthma—that I treated him for. Well, almost treated him for. His complaints and his recollection of near death last time he had the identical symptoms so unnerved me that I asked a colleague to assume his care.

But the Dr. Feelgood experiences no such hesitancy... Perhaps it all starts innocently—a rich, famous guy with a tiny problem walks into the office. He can't sleep at night. He's so friendly, sincere, not stuck up like some celebs. Then he comes back a week later because of a sore ankle, wanting a little codeine and bearing an autographed photo or a CD. Other patients notice and figure you must be a pretty good doctor if Mr. Showbiz is coming in....

I once wrote about that concern over VIP complaints, in a medscape column. And, like the author, the only thing that impresses me about these celebrity docs is their creativity -- Sepkowitz describes how the first Dr. Feelgood used solubilized placenta. And, while the risks of propofol dosing are drummed into our heads in training, it never occurred to me a doctor-to-the-stars might use propofol outside the hospital on an unmonitored patient.

While it didn't surprise me that propofol has been considered in
palliative care
and even implicated in a murder, it turns out propofol (diprivan) abuse and dependency is not unheard of and, as this review by Roussin shows, some IRB actually permitted trials:

Normal healthy volunteers (n = 12) were exposed in a blind fashion to acute bolus injections of 0.6 mg/kg of propofol and to a similar volume of soy-based lipid emulsion (similar to the vehicule of propofol) twice. After these sampling sessions, they were asked to choose which drug they preferred to be injected with. Propofol was chosen by 50% of the subjects, and seemed to have been based on the pleasant subjective effects. In contrast, the choice of placebo (Intralipid®) seemed to have been based on either non-intense subjective effects during the propofol sampling session (increased dizziness, confusion) or residual effects (fatigue) after the sessions. These results suggest that, in some healthy volunteers, propofol functioned as a reward.

...From a psychopharmacologists' standpoint, propofol shares properties in common with many drugs that are abused. In particular, the onset of the effects of propofol are rapid and this drug makes people 'feel good' and feel relaxed [45]. The mood-altering effects of subanaesthetic doses of propofol delivered via an infusion or by an acute bolus injection have been assessed in human healthy volunteers [44,52]. Subjects reported feeling high, lightheaded, spaced out and sedated....

I read up on propofol use a lot a year ago, in preparation for a talk on procedural sedation. At that point I think its only foray into pop culture's collective consciousness was a poem by Karl Kirchwey called "Propofol" that ran a year ago in the New Yorker. It began:

Moly, mandragora, milk of oblivion:
I said to Doctor Day, "You bring on night."
"But then," he said, "I bring day back again,"
and smiled; except his smile was thin and slight.

Now everyone's talking about propofol. The ASA is using this opportunity to reintroduce talk of restricting propofol to their specialty alone (despite abundant and mounting evidence that it's used safely in ED procedural sedation). Reporters are wondering why propofol administration is not as closely logged as, say, opiates.

All this activity suggests it soon will be. And while keeping this drug out of the hands of abusers and enablers is a worthy goal of regulation, I hope those who've demonstrated a safe track record are not prohibited from using this unique medication.

One that won't make me nervous

I'd been meaning to get rid of some comment-spam on this blog, from dubious web hucksters selling percocet and vicodin... but an FDA advisory panel may have solved my problem in a different way, today recommending to ban painkillers that contain acetaminophen (this was part of a series of decisions to limit overdoses of tylenol, in the hopes of preventing what is now the #1 cause of liver failure in the US).

The panel's decision let to my first front page post on Metafilter which recapped some of tylenol's history and its popularity (because of their rigid self-link rules, I couldn't highlight my Medgadget post on Tylenol at 50).

The Metafilter discussion was intelligent as usual, though unfortunately I couldn't stick around to address some misconceptions that arose. Some highlights for those who don't want to sift through 100+ comments:

Meehawl wrote:
you could just mandate that all paracetemol be combined with a sufficient dose of methionine to replenish the liver's glutathione levels and so lower the probability of a runaway toxic fulmination. This would of course make the pills more expensive to manufacture so that's not really going to happen. The argument against it, using the high NNT of 999 people who would be pre-treated with methionine so that the 1 overdoser can benefit seems lacking given the severity of the outcome, the cost of the post-exposure treatment, and the lack of side effects of the pre-treatment.

homonculus wrote:
Also, it is important for pain patients to be heard by the FDA about this: if they are thinking of pulling something like getting rid of Vicodin and Percoset *without* offering replacements without the acetaminophen that are the same level controlled substances, it would be very bad for pain patients.

There does appear to be a hydrocodone (Vicodin) which is schedule III and an oxycodone (percocet) with ibruprofen instead, which is schedule II, which would be existing options but schedule II's are more of a pain in the butt.

I just read a bit about that. From MedPageToday:

In a far less decisive vote, the committee voted 20 to 17 in favor of a more extreme recommendation to pull all prescription products containing acetaminophen from the market.

Because the split was so close, it is unclear whether the FDA will adopt the recommendation, but if it did, some options would be eliminated for pain patients. For instance, patients taking Vicodin would not have an acetaminophen-free option because there is no hydrocodone-only formula.

In addition, removing the acetaminophen from the Vicodin would move the drug into the more-strictly regulated "class II" schedule of narcotics from its current classification as a class III drug, creating additional barriers for physicians prescribing the drug to patients.

That makes me think it's unlikely the FDA will ban them. The outcry would be too great.

stopgap looked up the other drug use mortality data and compared it to tylenol's 56,000 OD presentations and 1000-1600 liver failures:

For the others, the following stats are from 2005. I saw some reports that suggest MDMA might be around 50, and I also saw marijuana as 0.

Heroin: 2,011
Cocaine: 6,228
Ecstasy/MDMA: no data
Marijuana (Cannabis poisoning): 112
Cars: 45,343

Clearly, we need to reduce the standard dosage of motor vehicle use.

But the most spot-on comment may have been the first one, by inigo2:
Sweeeet - my medicine cabinet's gonna be worth a ton in a few months.

Thanks to our collective number crunching, we now have a handle on the problem -- 56,000 acetaminophen overdoses, with 1600 progressing to liver failure. It sounds unacceptable until you realize there were 124 million prescriptions of tylenol combined with opiates, and untold numbers of OTC Tylenols taken as well. Suddenly the number of complications looks manageable, compared to the amount of patients that rely on these drugs. That, plus the UK's mixed results in managing this problem, suggests to me that banning percocet and vicodin is not the solution.

I'm looking forward to reading more from medical bloggers in the days to come about this practice-changing recommendation. But for now I just want to reflect on a rite of passage: tomorrow, graduated medical students become interns and start ordering and prescribing their first drugs. I remember receiving advice about this transition, hearing that 'in July, when you're first adapting to responsibility for patients, you'll think twice before even ordering Tylenol for a fever.' Well, with a likely black box warning to come and increased scrutiny on dosing, tomorrow's interns will be anxious about ordering Tylenol long past July.

Get back to the basics for you

Folks with writer's block have no end of excuses-- I'll just offer up as a defense that even as output on blogborygmi trickled to nothing, I was blogging a lot on my residency's website. And, honestly, I didn't want anything I wrote to be misinterpreted during interview season, which has a stifling effect on creativity.

But there's another possibility that's been rattling around my brain, more since Farhad Manjoo phrased it so succinctly a few weeks ago in Slate. What if I stopped contributing to the medblog community because I had changed the way I accessed it, in moving from bookmarked websites to RSS? Quoth Manjoo:

RSS started to bring me down. You know that sinking feeling you get when you open your e-mail and discover hundreds of messages you need to respond to—that realization that e-mail has become another merciless chore in your day? That's how I began to feel about my reader. RSS readers encourage you to oversubscribe to news. Every time you encounter an interesting new blog post, you've got an incentive to sign up to all the posts from that blog—after all, you don't want to miss anything. Eventually you find yourself subscribed to hundreds of blogs, many of which, you later notice, are completely useless. It's like having an inbox stuffed with e-mail from overactive listservs you no longer care to read.

It's true that many RSS readers have great tools by which to organize your feeds, and folks more capable than I am have probably hit on ways to categorize their blogs in a way that makes it easy to get through them. But that was just my problem—I began to resent that I had to think about organizing my reader. Moreover, I hated the software's bland interface; when you read blogs through RSS, you're only getting text, not design, so every blog looks like every other blog. But I didn't want Gawker to look like the New Republic; I needed a visual difference, in the same way that I want the National Enquirer to look distinct from the New York Times

He goes on to describe his new system for perusing websites, which sounded a lot like my old bookmark hierarchy. Since reading his article, I've started trying to recreate that old system, but now using Speed Dial groups for firefox. With any luck, I'll soon feel that vibrant sense of community that I enjoyed so much, years ago...

Social coteries, that's me

I'm helping my hospital draft a policy on The New Media. Is there anyone out there who's worked on something similar, or can point me to another institution's document?

If so, please leave a comment below, or email me, or give me a tweet, or contact me via LinkedIn or Facebook...

He's just resting

The report of my [blog's] death is... an exaggeration.

Which is to say: some responsibilities have come to an end, others have yet to begin, things have come into focus, and now's a good time to return to blogborygmi.