A VIDEO RECORDING OF THIS INTERVIEW IS AVAILABLE AT THIS LINK . In treating most exacerbations of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) the usual regimen consists of prednisone plus 5- to 7-days of antibiotics. But what if a shorter course of antibiotic therapy would do? That would be both convenient for patients and less likely to promote antibiotic resistance. A recent paper in Therapeutic Advances in Respiratory Disease describes just such a strategy: patients received prednisone plus ...
Sep 02, 2022•14 min
A VIDEO RECORDING OF THIS INTERVIEW IS AVAILABLE HERE . This time, we look to New York for guidance on recognizing and treating monkeypox. Dr. Eric Meyerowitz of Montefiore and Dr. Stephen Baum of Einstein will lead you through the monkeypox thicket in a 17-minute chat. Included below is information for patients as well as links to some key articles of interest to clinicians. LINKS: For patients: Dr. Barry Zingman’s “Monkeypox — What you need to know” For clinicians: NEJM article on monkeypox in...
Aug 19, 2022•17 min
A VIDEO RECORDING OF THIS INTERVIEW IS AVAILABLE HERE . We’re back with another interview from this year’s IASLC conference. This time, Christine Sadlowski and Dr. Julia Rotow interview Dr. Mariano Provencio about the survival outcomes from the NADIM II trial. In that trial, patients with resectable stage III AB non-small cell lung cancer received nivolumab plus chemotherapy versus chemotherapy alone. Overall survival at 5 years in these patients has been roughly 30%, according to Provencio. Wit...
Aug 11, 2022•10 min
A VIDEO RECORDING OF THIS INTERVIEW IS AVAILABLE HERE . Interim results on overall survival in phase 3 of the IMpower010 trial were presented at this year’s meeting of the International Assosciation for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC). As part of the NEJM Group’s coverage of the conference, Christine Sadlowski interviewed the presenter, Dr. Enriqueta Felip. In a 15-minute interview, she discusses the implications for different patient groups and the past, present, and future of the IMpower tria...
Aug 09, 2022•15 min
A VIDEO RECORDING OF THIS INTERVIEW IS AVAILABLE HERE . THE USUAL AUDIO FILE IS AVAILABLE BELOW Steven Cummings has co-written a take-no-prisoners editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine . The topic? Vitamin D supplements. The conclusion? “…providers should stop screening for 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels or recommending vitamin D supplements, and people should stop taking vitamin D supplements to prevent major diseases or extend life.” Dr. Cummings was commenting on research findings from...
Jul 28, 2022•13 min
A VIDEO RECORDING OF THIS ROUNDTABLE IS AVAILABLE CLICK HERE . THE USUAL AUDIO FILE IS AVAILABLE BELOW Your host is old enough to remember when hospital corridors featured physicians with little black bags, scurrying around to see their patients. That’s no longer true, of course. Most of the physicians seen in those corridors these days are white-coated employees. The Annals of Internal Medicine reported a few months ago that “By 2018, 71% of newly certified general internists practiced as hospi...
Jul 20, 2022•30 min
CREST-2’s results are probably more than a year away. In the meantime, what to do about diagnosed severe (but asymptomatic) carotid stenosis? Recent results suggest that medical management compares favorably with the surgical approach. In this edition, we address the question with a conversation between Dr. Allan Brett, NEJM Journal Watch ‘s editor-in-chief, and Dr. Seemant Chaturvedi, a University of Maryland neurologist who serves on CREST-2’s executive committee. [Running time: 16 minutes] NE...
Jul 06, 2022•16 min
Locally advanced rectal cancer usually receives a three-part treatment: chemotherapy followed by radiotherapy and then surgery. In a small-cohort study presented at this year’s ASCO conference researchers used a PD-1 inhibitor — dostarlimab — every three weeks for 6 months against the disease. All patients had mismatch repair deficient tumors. No other treatments were needed however, since the 12 patients all attained complete response if they completed the regimen. As part of the NEJM Group’s c...
Jun 29, 2022•13 min
Patients with metastatic breast cancer whose tumors express low levels of HER2 are generally classified and treated as having HER2-negative disease. However, Dr. Shanu Modi of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and a group of international collaborators explored the use of a monoclonal antibody–drug conjugate (trastuzumab–deruxtecan) in patients with disease they classify as HER2-“low.” Compared with “low” patients treated with one of several standard-of-care regimens, those receiving th...
Jun 27, 2022•11 min
Apnea testing is part of the protocol used to determine whether a patient is dead according to neurologic criteria. The question is, do clinicians need to obtain consent to proceed? In a fascinating 15-minute chat, two intensivists, Drs. Patricia Kritek and Robert Truog, discuss that question and another, larger one: what is death, anyway? Their back-and-forth was prompted by a recent debate, published in Chest , between two others — a clinician and a law professor. Have a listen, and please lea...
Jun 17, 2022•15 min
In the early waves of the Covid-19 pandemic why did patients in unionized nursing homes, have a roughly 10% lower rate of mortality than those in non-unionized ones? A report in Health Affairs tries to sort out the possible reasons. Listen to our 13-minute interview, which raises the question: Should you send your patients to non-unionized facilities? […] The post Podcast 291: Unionized nursing homes had lower mortality during Covid-19 first appeared on Clinical Conversations ....
May 24, 2022•13 min
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recently issued its sixth set of guidelines on using daily aspirin to prevent cardiovascular disease. The guidelines appeared in JAMA — whose editors asked our guest, Dr. Allan Brett, to write an editorial evaluation. This edition carries Brett’s advice on using the new guidelines in daily clinical practice. Brett’s JAMA editorial USPSTF […] The post Podcast 290: USPSTF’s new take on aspirin and primary prevention of CVD first appeared on Clinical Conversa...
May 08, 2022•15 min
Saline or balanced crystalloids? The question of which resuscitation fluid to use in clinical practice seems to have been settled by recent research findings — or at least settled in favor of balanced crystalloids. But wait, our guests see slight differences that may affect your choice. Patricia Kritek practices critical care medicine at the University of […] The post Podcast 289: Saline versus balanced crystalloids — what to choose first appeared on Clinical Conversations ....
May 04, 2022•16 min
Spend 15 minutes with Dr. Natalia Shevchuk, whom we interviewed by candlelight last month. She is sheltering in the Odessa region now, having left the Donetsk area. This time, she relates how she lost a colleague in Russia’s attack on the Kramatorsk railway station and found another she’d feared lost in Mariupol. She told us that […] The post Podcast 288: Following up with a Ukrainian narcologist first appeared on Clinical Conversations ....
Apr 21, 2022•15 min
During the American Academy of Neurology’s 2022 meeting in Seattle, Dr. Richard Lipton of Albert Einstein College of Medicine took questions from Dr. Teshamae Monteith (U. Miami) and Joe Elia. Lipton’s group sought to characterize the impact of patients’ monthly headache days on their quality of life, especially the role of depression, allodynia, and anxiety. (Read […] The post Podcast 287: Thinking about quality-of-life in migraine first appeared on Clinical Conversations ....
Apr 10, 2022•14 min
Dr. Natalia Shevchuk (pictured above) treats substance use disorders in Ukraine’s Donetsk region. Her face is candlelit because her town is under curfew, and people aren’t allowed to put on their room lights (if they have electricity) in the hours of darkness, lest Russian bombardments use the lights as guides. She talked with Dr. Ali Raja […] The post Podcast 286: Talking about addiction treatment by candlelight from Ukraine’s Donetsk region first appeared on Clinical Conversations ....
Mar 21, 2022•19 min
Gastroesophageal reflux, or GERD, was the focus of a revised set of guidelines issued in January in the American Journal of Gastroenterology. Given the frequency of that condition in primary care clinics, internist and NEJM Journal Watch editor-in-chief Allan Brett proposed a discussion about the practical application of these guidelines with David Bjorkman. Dr. Bjorkman, […] The post Podcast 285: GERD’s revised guidelines — an internist and a gastroenterologist discuss them. first appeared on C...
Mar 11, 2022•24 min
Some 85 years ago Guernica was bombed, and after that came Dresden, Coventry, Hiroshima, Bach Mai, and the rest. This episode of Clinical Conversations asks how it might be possible to help clinicians under bombardment in Ukraine. As you will hear, one hospital in Chernihiv keeps all but essential staff away from its buildings when […] The post Podcast 284: The clinical situation in Ukraine first appeared on Clinical Conversations ....
Mar 08, 2022•20 min
You want more evidence that post-recovery vaccination against Covid-19 reinfection helps? Here is a careful study from the U.K. that followed some 35,000 health care workers — initially without symptoms — in over 100 institutions there. Starting in June 2020 the SIREN study tested these people regularly, with blood sampling every month and nasal swabs […] The post Podcast 283: More data — this time from the U.K. — about post-Covid vaccination first appeared on Clinical Conversations ....
Feb 22, 2022•11 min
Governments’ directives about how and when to vaccinate people who’ve recovered from Covid-19 vary widely. But, according to this episode’s guest, Dr. Ronen Arbel, they all say they don’t have enough evidence to set firm policy. So, Arbel and his colleagues set out to collect evidence from some 150,000 patients’ records in Israel who’d recovered […] The post Podcast 282: Vaccination after Covid-19 recovery prolongs natural immunity to reinfection first appeared on Clinical Conversations ....
Feb 17, 2022•15 min
Why can’t the U.S. control prescription drug pricing as they do in the U.K., where per-capita spending is less than half our level? In a capitalist democracy, many parties — the drug companies, medical associations, consumer groups — get to lobby their points of view. Is the problem intractable, or just an exercise in chaos? Our three […] The post Podcast 281: Drug Costs — What’s “The Right Price” for prescription pharmaceuticals? first appeared on Clinical Conversations ....
Feb 05, 2022•26 min
Multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (or MIS-C) is a serious complication of Covid-19 infection, usually showing up about a month after infection. CDC worked with several hospitals around the U.S. to discern whether vaccination in adolescents would lessen the likelihood of this outcome. A vaccine hadn’t yet been approved, as it now is, for kids between […] The post Podcast 280: MIS-C after Covid-19 in adolescents — can vaccination prevent it? first appeared on Clinical Conversations ....
Jan 14, 2022•16 min
Kiarri Kershaw has written a simple letter in JACC — the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. The letter conveys a strong message: health inequities don’t act uniformly across one’s lifetime. Her examination of Black versus white mortality from all causes and from cardiovascular causes with the use of age-specific data shows places in […] The post Podcast 279: Age-specific data do better than age-adjusted data in revealing health inequities first appeared on Clinical Conversations ....
Sep 27, 2021•6 min
An internist at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Joseph Betancourt also runs their program on equity and community health. In this, the final entry in our four-interview exploration of race and clinical equity, Betancourt talks about the need for medical institutions to pay attention to what’s happening in their patients’ communities. To that end, MGH has a […] The post Podcast 278: Where equity and community health intersect — a conversation with Joseph Betancourt first appeared on Clinical ...
Apr 27, 2021•17 min
Dr. Sheares talks about her experience with inequities. She believes that clinicians should aspire to be students of their patients as well as of the pathophysiology of the diseases their patients present with. Listen in. Running time: 20 minutes The post Podcast 277: Race and clinical equity — know your patients — a conversation with Karen Dorsey Sheares first appeared on Clinical Conversations ....
Apr 26, 2021•21 min
In this, our second conversation on race and clinical equity, Dr. Karol Watson of UCLA offers her observations on what she’s observed as a cardiologist trying to deal with treatment plans for patients who’ve lost their health insurance or have had to go to a plan that doesn’t cover what’s needed. She reminds us that tagging […] The post Podcast 276: Pay attention to the structural barriers that contribute to clinical inequity — Karol Watson first appeared on Clinical Conversations ....
Apr 18, 2021•11 min
We’ve conducted a set of four interviews with physicians on the topic of race and clinical equity. The conversations center not so much on their published research, but on the roles that these physicians take in their organizations and, in addition, the stories they tell about their own experiences. Our first is with Dr. Kimberly Manning, who’s […] The post Podcast 275: Race and Clinical Equity — a Conversation with Dr. Kimberly Manning first appeared on Clinical Conversations ....
Apr 11, 2021•20 min
Apologies for the long silence. We have been off doing other things — one of which has been figuring out how to cover conferences. Last month, after much preparation, we covered the American Society of Hematology (ASH) annual conference; our second foray consists of brief coverage of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) gastrointestinal […] The post Podcast 274: Preliminary Thoughts on the 2021 ASCO Gastrointestinal Cancer Conference first appeared on Clinical Conversations ....
Jan 18, 2021•19 min
Eric Rubin is editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. I asked him how COVID-19 has affected that journal, which has been around since the War of 1812 and seen its share of pandemics. Listen in — it’s the first in a planned series of interviews with the editors of the principal clinical journals. Running time: 19 minutes […] The post Podcast 273: The journals and the pandemic — NEJM first appeared on Clinical Conversations ....
Aug 29, 2020•19 min
Dr. Paul Sax writes the closest thing that the NEJM Group has to humor. He’s serious, of course, since his blog “HIV and ID Observations” concerns all things infectious . But he sprinkles in the odd cartoon or links to … dog videos, fer cryin’ out loud. He scours the ID literature (and we must include […] The post Podcast 272: And now for something completely different… almost first appeared on Clinical Conversations ....
Aug 08, 2020•10 min
