Author: admin
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Preventing Physician Burnout
I recently came across this interesting article about physician burnout. It was a nice review of the relevant literature. The authors addressed the obvious issues such as job dissatisfaction, turnover and related financial and career-related issues. They also did a really good job describing the correlation between physician burnout and medical errors (and malpractice claims),…
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More evidence that exercise helps with mood
A study was published in Lancet Psychiatry yesterday that added to the evidence that exercise is good for one’s mental health. In this study, participants rated their mood nearly 1.5 days per month less if they exercised compared to similar people who didn’t exercise. Those who engaged in team sports, cycling and other exercise with…
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Switching Psych Meds Often Doesn’t Help
A recently published meta-analysis of over 3000 studies suggested that switching antidepressants after the first drug doesn’t produce the desired results is not better than staying the course and/or exploring options other than trying a different drug. This is a very interesting finding as most prescribing clinicians tend to give one antidepressant a “trial” of…
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Prevalence of Psychiatric Medication Use
A recent research letter, published by JAMA, reported that one out of six American adults take at least one psychiatric medication. As a clinical psychologist I understand the benefits of non-medical treatments for psychiatric illness, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate appropriate use of psychiatric meds. In fact, I refer a significant number of…
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When Patients Try to Seduce Doctors
I was recently interviewed for a Medscape article about maintaining professional boundaries, entitled, When Patients Try to Seduce Doctors. It’s a relatively short piece and, though I was misquoted a little, it has some good information about the doctor-patient relationship and the importance of establishing and upholding appropriate professional boundaries. Check it out.
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Why Placebos Work
A recent article in The Wall Street Journal summarizes some of the explanations about how we think placebos work. If you read an earlier blog post I wrote about placebos, what I find so fascinating about all this is that even when subjects/patients are told they are receiving a placebo (either in the form of…
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Exercise to Argue Better
Let’s face it, all couples argue (well, some don’t but they probably don’t communicate much). Typically when we argue we we try to convince the other person that we are right and they are wrong. In doing so we tend not to listen much; instead while the other person is speaking we are thinking up…
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No time to exercise?
A really interesting study just came out on PLOS One that should be of particular interest to those of us who say they just don’t have enough time to exercise. The study took a bunch of sedentary guys and divided them into three groups: regular exercise, interval training and lazy controls. The guys in the…
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Falling Asleep Quicker
There are several topics that seem to come up with patient after patient and I find myself making the same suggestions over and over again. One of these topics is sleep hygiene. Simply stated, sleep hygiene is a way to describe your behaviors and habits related to sleep. There are several types of insomnia including…
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Happiness Promotes Health
In a recent presentation, US Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy said, “If there was a factor in your life that could reduce your risk of having a heart attack or a stroke, that could increase your chances of living longer, and would make your children less likely to engage in crime or use drugs, and…