Archive | March 2012
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Clean Your Teeth and Check for HIV?
People are used to feeling uncomfortable at the dentist, whether its suffering the drill or trying to make conversation with a gloved finger in your mouth. Given this baseline, perhaps the dentists’ office is the perfect place for another awkward experience: testing for HIV. This intriguing proposal has been made by public health advocates since […]
(NOT) Playing Games with Sexual Health
By Dianna Douglas Maybe you’re the type of person to see a tiny nonsensical phrase in the credits of a movie and actually dig into it online. Be careful—you might find yourself sucked into a mystery story. Over the course of a week, you get a text message from someone you’ve been mindlessly Googling, you […]
When Computer Infections Help Science
Under normal circumstances, people want to keep infections away from their computers. But for Gary An, reconstructing nasty infections inside a computer is a research project, not an act of cyber-terrorism. In collaboration with laboratories at the University of Chicago Medicine studying infectious diseases, An is creating computer models that simulate the delicate, complex balance […]
PURLs of Wisdom
By Matt Wood Family medicine physicians try to stay current in their fields by reading the latest medical journals and research literature, but the volume of new research can be overwhelming. To deal with this flood of information, the Family Physicians Inquiries Network created a system called Priority Updates from the Research Literature, or PURLs, […]
Dr. FAQ: Who Pays When Patients Leave Against Medical Advice?
There are ways in which patients who leave the hospital against medical advice wind up paying for that decision. Being saddled with the full cost of their hospital stay, however, is not one of them. Insurance companies know this. Patients who walk out may know this. But many physicians, according to a study published in […]
The Deep Impact of Childhood Sleep Apnea
By Matt Wood Hearing a young child snore like Grandpa may be cute, but it’s not something to ignore. Excessive snoring in children is a symptom of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), a condition marked by repeated episodes of obstructed breathing during sleep that has been linked to cognitive problems, obesity and long-term damage to the […]
