Several patients Wednesday made me reflect on how fortunate I am to be doing what I do for a living.

There was the young man with chest pain, skin problems and unusually long fingers. Could it be that he had a syndrome I have never diagnosed before?

There was the woman with a platelet disorder and new onset atrial fibrillation. The cardiologist had recommended against using blood thinners because of the woman’s low risk for stroke based on her CHADS score, but had deferred to her hematologist and me because of her thrombocytosis. The hematologist couldn’t be sure that her hydroxyurea treatment completely neutralized her risk for blood clots, and wanted to defer to the cardiologist and me. I was able to pull it all together for her by showing her the NNT, or number needed to treat, for patients with her CHADS score. She chose to go with aspirin alone and left the office visibly relieved that nobody was trying to make her take warfarin.

There was also the young mother who wept about the loss of her grandmother a few days earlier. “Gram was my best friend”, she said, adding “I need to keep it together for my two-year-old daughter”. The woman’s presenting complaint of cough and shortness of breath didn’t seem to be a sign of anything dangerous. At the end of our visit I pointed out how fortunate she was to have been that close to her grandmother while growing up. I encouraged her to help her little girl know the importance of family the way she did.

My last two patients were a husband and wife, both around eighty years old. He had almost crushed his lower leg in a farming accident, and came in for a wound check and some pain pills, which he had declined on his first visit.

“I’m too stoved up to wrestle with my cows now. The shape I’m in, I couldn’t even wrestle the rooster”, he muttered in his thick local accent.

His wife’s blood pressure checked out okay, and I asked her to come back in the spring for a recheck. She looked me square in the eye and said:

“I’ll call you if I need you”.

There was enough time left to take care of all the incoming laboratory and x-ray reports, prescription refills and other chores well before five o’clock.

I wished my nurse, Autumn, “Happy Thanksgiving” before calling my wife to tell her I was on my way. I turned out the office lights and locked the clinic door behind me. My Thanksgiving was already well under way.

Can you imagine a doctor telling a heart attack survivor:

“That was a close call, but I’m glad you made it. I’ll see you next time you have one. Oh, by the way, you might want to watch that cholesterol.”

I thought not. Yet, that is how most of the one million kidney stone cases are handled every year in the United States at a cost reported to exceed four billion dollars.

Kidney stone pain is said to be one of the worst pains a person can experience. In medical school we were taught that patients with a ruptured appendix are likely to lie perfectly still on the exam table whereas kidney stone patients are in such agony that they are unable to stay long enough on the table for you to examine them.

We have all kinds of technologies available for kidney stone removal, all of them expensive. Prevention, on the other hand, is cheap but seldom done. Cynics may say that there are no incentives in this country to prevent diseases that provide steady work for physicians who treat them.

Over the years I have seen public awareness and special interest groups crop up for just about every disease, even rare ones like SCID, Asperger’s and Rett Syndrome. Common things like avoiding recurrent kidney stones seem to get less media attention.

Kidney stones are made up of uric acid (the same compound responsible for gout) or salts containing calcium and another ingredient like oxalate, phosphate or struvite. Regardless of stone composition, recurrences can be partly prevented by simply drinking more water, which dilutes the stone-forming chemicals. Interestingly, there is a “kidney stone belt” in the southern part of the United States that is said to be expanding northward as a result of global warming, with projections of a 25% increase in kidney stone cases by the year 2050.

The Calcium Paradox

Depending on the chemical composition of kidney stones and levels of urinary excretion of key ingredients, specific dietary interventions and medications can help reduce a patient’s risk for recurrent stones. Doctors, like everyone else, however sometimes jump to conclusions. Some things seem so obvious that nobody questions them. Then, when scientific research proves our assumptions to be wrong, we refuse to believe, or perhaps we just forget what we have learned. This is at the core of what we call Evidence Based Medicine.

It was long assumed that if you restricted a person’s intake of calcium, the risk for kidney stones would decrease. The New England Journal of Medicine reported in 1993 that the opposite was true; a low calcium diet increases kidney stone risk. I seem to remember hearing the same thing during my training in Sweden long before then.

The reason for this calcium paradox seems to be that a low calcium diet causes more ingested oxalate in the intestine to exist in a free form, rather than attached to calcium. The free intestinal oxalate is more easily absorbed, leading to more oxalate in the urine, where it can combine with even small amounts of calcium to form a kidney stone.

Yet, I often hear that kidney stone patients are told by their doctors to restrict their calcium intake. I also hear both doctors and patients make general statements about the effects of fluid pills (diuretics) and vitamin C. Without knowing what type of stone a patient has, such generalizations are simply not helpful. 

Physicians have an obligation to help patients avoid illness when there is good evidence available to guide us. Kidney stone prevention is not as glamorous as blasting stones with lithotripsy. As with any disease prevention, the way you know it works is that nothing happens. Any physician who has faced a kidney stone patient writhing with excruciating pain can appreciate that nothing happening is more humane than “See you next time”.

Mrs. Jarvis seemed almost exasperated with my questions. She had told me all her symptoms a couple of times and I had asked several follow-up questions. Between our first and second visit she had gone for several tests, but I could not make a unified diagnosis. I was beginning to think she had several things going on, but I couldn’t make sense of her nausea.

“I am stuck,” I said. She sighed as I continued: “I must be missing something in your story.” Then, in a moment of inspiration, I got up from my stool and walked over to the exam room door as she followed my movements with suspicion and disbelief in her eyes.

With one hand on the doorknob I turned toward her and explained what I was doing:

“Pretend I’m an amnesiac and you never met me or told me what you are feeling. I need to hear your story again from the beginning and without interruptions.”

She giggled as I walked back across the room, shook her hand and introduced myself. Her husband grinned from his chair in the corner.

Nausea is a lot like dizziness. I remembered the lecture on dizziness Dr. Martin Samuels had given at a Continuing Medcal  Education course I attended years ago. Dr. Samuels is Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and one of the most captivating lecturers I know.

Don’t ask a dizzy patient any questions, because with that particular symptom, all questions are leading questions. If you ask a dizzy patient a single thing, they’ll say: “yes, that’s what it’s like” and you are doomed, Dr. Samuels cautions.

In order to evaluate a dizzy patient, you need to lean back in your chair, touch your chin, take some deep breaths and look out the window, not at the patient. Then you need to just sit there for a while and finally say: “Dizzy…?” You then must wait as long as it takes for the patient to tell you more.

Mrs. Jarvis smiled as I did my Marty Samuels impression. Her husband leaned forward from his chair.

With renewed resolve to avoid any leading questions that might derail her story, I said in a reflective tone of voice:

“Nauseous…?”

Five minutes later, without asking a single further question, I knew what to do.

Last week I saw an elderly woman whose daughter brought her in with a long list of symptoms, including palpitations, chest pain, fatigue, forgetfulness, dizziness, headaches, chronic leg swelling, abdominal pain and irregular bowels.

“She needs a complete physical,” the daughter said.

I disagreed. In my opinion, she needed a thorough evaluation of her symptoms and concerns, starting with her most urgent symptom of chest pain. She was simply not well enough for a routine physical.

This is no joke: A routine exam is essentially for healthy people. Patients with alarming symptoms need to have them evaluated promptly in a focused way, and not wait until their next routine physical, where the urgent issues would have to be dealt with in conjunction with immunization advice and all kinds of health maintenance issues.

Not everybody believes in the annual physical. Medicare doesn’t cover it, and most of the things doctors do during such an exam are of little or no proven benefit, as the proponents of evidence-based medicine remind us.

Those routine tests that are supported by the evidence are not usually recommended on an annual basis, but rather at different intervals for different age groups.

As far as the old-fashioned head-to-toe physical, there is simply no scientific support for it if you listen to the U.S. Public Health Task Force or the big insurance companies.

I have always shied away from the term “complete physical”, because there really is no such thing in clinical practice. There are always more things you could do, but don’t – we all have to budget our time as well as all other resources in our profession.

For many years now I have preferred the term “Annual Review”, because, in preventive medicine as in clinical diagnosis, you can usually accomplish more by simply talking to your patient than by delving into examinations and procedures right away.

In my practice, I see the Annual Review as my opportunity to ask patients things that they may not have thought of bringing to my attention. It is my opportunity, just like in the “well child visit,” to offer what we call anticipatory guidance – addressing things that might become problems in the future, and how to avoid that happening.

I am more likely to find a patient with angina by asking him how he feels when he splits and stacks firewood than by auscultating his heart or doing an annual resting EKG in my office. I also think I am more likely to spot a depressed patient if I have a chance to ask a few open-ended questions about how things are going than if I only rely on questionnaires.

There is no doubt that certain parts of the routine physical exam are valuable. I tend to talk my way through the exam, asking questions while I touch the patient, explaining what I am looking for, and encouraging the patient to do their own breast exam, lymph node or testicular exam. 

And, getting back to auscultating the heart, it is necessary to do. A physical without listening to the heart is like a dinner without a main course. People expect it, and you never know what you’ll hear if you stop and listen for half a minute or so.

I didn’t need an EKG to diagnose my elderly chest pain patient with atrial fibrillation.

“I don’t know if you understand, Doc, what kind of man this is.”

The man who spoke appeared to be a few years my junior. He was speaking of his father, who is one of my patients at the local Veteran’s Home, where I am a relative newcomer.

“This man fought in two wars and earned two Medals of Honor. He is not going to tell you how much pain he is in, even when you ask him, because he isn’t even going to admit to himself how much he hurts.”

He made a point I actually hadn’t considered before during my tenure at the Veteran’s Home. My patient has metastatic cancer, and the nursing staff asks him every day to rate his pain. His answer is always 2 on a scale from 0 to 10.

As doctors and nurses we estimate our patients’ discomfort through their words and also through their vital signs, facial expressions, posture and other nonverbal clues. But when it comes to treating war heroes, do our usual instruments fall short?

I remember thinking when I admitted the ailing veteran that he seemed so humble and plain spoken. The words “true hero” came across my mind then. I didn’t consider that I might not be able to accurately assess his cancer pain or his level of distress over his terminal diagnosis.

There is a lot of talk about cultural competency in this country. Today I even read in one of the publications of the American Medical Association that several states are mandating that physicians take courses to improve their skills in dealing with patients from cultural and ethnic minorities.

Somehow I think we oversimplify the issue of cultural competency if we focus on only those we think of as minority groups. Our challenge in caring for all our patients is to meet them where they are, to step out of our own world long enough to at least get a glimpse of theirs. We must first meet as human beings before we can begin our medical assessment.

War heroes are a minority, too.

Why would a toothache bring Ted Larson to the emergency room when he already takes half a dozen morphine tablets per day for his chronic back pain?

Why did Bridget Hall’s fibromyalgia pain seem to escalate after her last doctor gave her long-acting oxycodone?

Is Bob Bachman really in that much pain from his arthritis, or is he sharing or even selling his pills?

Taking care of patients with chronic pain is difficult. Physicians are at the same time told to recognize and treat pain better, and also to be more stringent with pain prescriptions to avoid drug diversion. Our understanding of the physiology and psychology of pain is evolving, as well as our knowledge of the science behind addiction.

As often before I see that some of the things I learned from my clinical professors in medical school were forgotten or even dismissed, only to come back into focus years later.

Thirty years ago I was taught that patients with ordinary low back pain would get better pain relief from modest doses of conventional pain medications if they were also prescribed a low dose of the antidepressant amitriptylene. The reason, as I remember it, was thought to be that amitriptylene made the brain interpret incoming pain signals differently.

Later, other authorities made a big distinction between mechanical low back pain and neuropathic or radicular pain, commonly referred to as sciatica. The focus shifted away from the brain’s interpretation of pain signals in general to whether a pain originated in the musculoskeletal system, like low back pain or arthritis, or in the peripheral nervous system, like sciatica.

When fibromyalgia was first recognized as a disease, there was a lot of confusion about where the pain came from. The name itself suggested that the pain originated in the musculoskeletal system. With the understanding at the time that such pains could be treated with narcotics, many fibromyalgia patients ended up on strong pain medications. We still used medications like amitriptylene and the more modern antidepressants with success, but the thinking was that these drugs worked mostly by improving sleep or treating unrecognized depression. Today we recognize fibromyalgia as a disease involving increased pain sensitivity of the nervous system, and we now have several medications targeting this mechanism.

We have also learned that patients who receive opiates for any kind of pain can develop a fibromyalgia-like intensification of nerve pain associated with ordinary touch, allodynia, or otherwise moderately painful stimuli. This phenomenon is called opioid-induced hyperalgesia. Paradoxically, decreasing such a patient’s pain medication dosage reduces their pain level.

More recently, even chronic musculoskeletal pain of arthritis has been shown to cause a nerve-mediated general pain sensitivity of a similar type. Patients with severe arthritis often experience aching and pain in areas without joint disease, such as skin or muscle tissue.

The practice of my early teachers, who treated most chronic pain as if it were at least in part nerve pain has found new respect and acceptance after many years of neglect as science has finally caught up with their clinical wisdom.

So when Ted Larson, already on chronic narcotics, complains of severe, nerve-mediated tooth pain, his pain is real and may actually be more severe than the same toothache in a person not on narcotics.

Bridget Hall’s fibromyalgia pain may actually have been made worse by the narcotics she was prescribed.

And Bob Bachman’s long-standing arthritis may indeed have made him increasingly pain sensitive. He has never failed a random urine drug screen or pill count. With the new data on neuropathic pain sensitization in patients with longstanding arthritis, it may be time to try him on something specifically for nerve pain, rather than increasing his regular pain medications.

Dinner conversations in medical families can be less than ordinary. Tonight we were talking about how to choose antidepressants for different types of patients. My wife, who worked side by side with me for many years as a Nurse Practitioner, is now doing other things, and her time away from practice has heightened her awareness of how clinicians often reach for their prescription pads very quickly when faced with patients, whose lives have presented them with more losses or sorrows than they can handle in the moment.

As we talked more, we realized that it was this very weekend – Columbus Day – eight or nine years ago that we attended probably the most profound Continuing Medical Education event of our careers. It was one of several parallel seminars offered by Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital’s Department of Psychiatry.

The title of the course was “The Shadow of the Object”, which is a quote from an enigmatic passage in “Mourning and Melancholia” by Freud. It was held in an old, slightly run-down family resort in the Catskills in upstate New York, very similar to the setting of the movie “Dirty Dancing”. In its heyday, this resort was a summer haven for middle class families from New York City – a chance to experience nature and participate in organized activities while mingling with people of their own kind.

The central idea of the conference was that we never “get over” loss or trauma – we just have to find ways to carry it with us in a fashion that makes sense for us. It is a simple notion, but it has profoundly affected how I have counseled patients from that moment on. There is such a tendency in our society to focus on the “positive”, to downplay the importance of sadness in a healthy and balanced life.

One particular thought we brought with us from “The Shadow of the Object” is the concept of moving through grief by finding ways to honor the legacy of the lost loved one. I have found that to be one of the most healing things you can teach those left behind after someone they respect and love passes away.

On our way home from the course, we spent one night at the Equinox Mountain Inn in Manchester, Vermont. It was another magical experience, dining and sleeping high above the clouds in a quirky 1960’s building at the site of an old charterhouse, or Carthusian monastery. It only seemed fitting that we ended our Continuing Medical Education weekend there – high above the ordinary places we usually frequent for such affairs, a place for quiet contemplation before stepping back into the normal practice routine, albeit a little bit changed.

Working with students always makes you think about why you do certain things the way you do them and why you may feel more strongly about some things than others.

Today, in talking with one of my students about how to do a history and physical exam, I admitted for the first time something that has plagued me for most of my career:

As an intern in Sweden during one of my first surgical subspecialty rotations I had to do the admissions of patients who came to the hospital the afternoon before elective procedures. Those were the days when nobody had to get up before the birds in order to check into the hospital at seven a.m. for same-day major operations and procedures.

I remember dutifully documenting the history of a man who mentioned in passing as I went through a Review of Systems that his bowel movements were getting narrower in diameter – a possible sign of colon cancer.

My attending physician was the head of his subspecialty department and a very busy surgeon. I must have had five or six admissions to do that afternoon.

I remember thinking that this patient’s altered bowel movements were significant and needed some type of follow-up. The attending was not on the ward, but doing a clinic at the other end of the hospital and the resident was seeing patients in the emergency room, so with several more admissions to take care of, I did what I thought was the best I could do and carefully documented the patients symptoms for the attending physician to read and presumably act on the next day before surgery.

The next morning when I arrived at the hospital he had already been in the O.R. for almost an hour and I didn’t get around to asking what he thought we should do about the patient, whose name I didn’t even remember by then.

It could not have been long afterward that I realized that attending physicians with busy surgical or clinic schedules don’t necessarily read their interns’ charts closely enough to find pearls of information deep inside paragraphs that document mostly normal findings.

I realized today why I feel so strongly about making clinical notes clearly distinguish between normal and abnormal findings. This has become an even bigger challenge with the seemingly ever-increasing need, at least in my adopted homeland, to document even perfectly normal exams in great detail for the sake of higher reimbursement and protection from lawsuits.

A macabre example of documentation just for the sake of documentation came to me a couple of years ago in the form of a four page printout of a cardiologist’s office note, which must have involved all of ten minutes of face-to-face time between doctor and patient. Most of the information in the office note was repeated Past, Family and Social History. The exam followed a template, and the Review of Systems had been imported from a patient questionnaire on an optical reader form, similar to ones we used for tests in school – I have seen that particular electronic health record in use.

Deep inside the four page document was a notation that the patient admitted to suicidal and homicidal thoughts. The busy cardiologist didn’t comment on it, and I dare say he never noticed it was there.

Ultimately, whether we are nurses, interns or Board Certified specialists, if we are the first or only ones to know about something important in a patient’s history or physical exam, we own it, at least until someone better suited can take over.

Emily Green knew there was a lump in her right breast. She was a new patient I saw a few weeks ago. Her previous doctor had sent her for a mammogram last year, but she had not come in for a clinical breast exam. She was a busy professional, who admitted she sometimes cut a few corners with her own health care.

I remember signing the order for her annual mammogram even before I met her. At that point in time, she had not made an appointment to see me, but I signed the order anyway.

In years past I used to stick to my guns and not order a mammogram for patients who had no intention to come and see me for a breast exam.

We all know that a mammogram is best done after a clinical breast exam, so that women with abnormalities on their exam can have a more comprehensive, or diagnostic, mammography study with an ultrasound examination to distinguish between solid and cystic masses.

Purist that I was, I insisted on doing the job right, and on my terms – exam first, then mammogram. I don’t know how many patients ended up having nothing at all done because of my stubbornness. After a lot of thought I decided to authorize mammograms for any woman who wanted one, whether she came in for a breast exam or not, since doing something seems better than possibly doing nothing to screen for cancer.

When I finally met Emily Green for her first appointment, she told me she was concerned about a small lump in the lower portion of her right breast. I agreed with her – the lump was a little larger than a pea, nontender and freely movable against the overlying and underlying tissue. Another, larger, irregular cluster of lumps toward her breast­bone in the 3 o’clock position seemed like typical fibrocystic disease.

At the end of her appointment we agreed on getting a diagnostic mammogram followed immediately by an ultrasound. Whether these tests showed anything or not, we also agreed to have her see a breast surgeon in consultation because of the suspicious nature of the lump at 6 o’clock. We also decided to get some updated blood tests and change her blood pressure medication.

I signed off on her normal radiology reports and added “cc: Dr. Fowler” at the bottom of each page.

When I saw Emily Friday to follow up on her blood tests and new medication, she had already seen the breast surgeon the day before. She was quite animated when she said:

“I can’t believe the tests didn’t show anything. I mean, I felt the lump, you felt it, and Dr. Fowler found it instantly. She’s set me up for a biopsy in less than two weeks! I never realized doctors might disagree with an x-ray.”

“A test is only a test” I mused. “Mammograms are probably best at finding little microcalcifications we can’t feel with our hands.”

“I guess so, but I still feel like I had a near miss”, she said. “What if I had just trusted the mammogram and not bothered to come and see you until the lump had grown some more?”

I reminded her that the biopsy may still come out negative, but agreed that it was very good she had taken the time to come in with her concern.

I still wonder, which is the better thing to do, authorizing screening mammograms to any and all or start insisting again on seeing patients for a clinical breast exam first.

Yesterday afternoon I sat in a dark room with a couple of doctors and several mental health professionals and participated in a video conference about integration of primary care and behavioral health. Outside, the late summer sun shone brightly just like it did September 11 eight years ago.

The case for integration is obvious; 85% of the time the ten most common symptoms brought to the attention of primary care doctors (chest pain, dizziness, fatigue, back pain and so on) have no known somatic explanation – the cause for the symptom appears to be psychological.

Yet, the words we use to interview patients, to document the history and physical examination findings, and to present our thoughts to our patients and to our behavioral health consultants are often extremely unhelpful and sometimes downright insulting to the patient.

It seems the place to start integrating primary care and behavioral health is with our everyday choices of words we use to describe the patients we see in our offices.

The days are essentially gone when doctors spoke in technical terms to each other and other medical professionals with the purpose of keeping the patient in the dark. For example, very few of the old prescription-related Latin phrases are still being understood and used by doctors and pharmacists, and most preprinted prescription pads no longer feature the optional “label” box, which in a bygone era gave the prescribing physician the option of not revealing the name of the drug to the patient.

We are nowadays cautioned to clear our vocabulary of words which we as physicians have used and understood to mean something perfectly neutral in clinical language, yet can be offensive to patients, who increasingly often end up reading their own medical records.

In my years as a physician I have read many chart entries that read something like this:

“This pathetic 57 year-old woman returns with a litany of complaints, and seems to completely lack insight into the real cause of her misery…”

Those are words that, perhaps, may insulate a doctor from bad feelings about his/her inability to help such a patient, but they aren’t likely to help the patient manage their symptoms or psychological issues, and they ultimately don’t belong in a therapeutic relationship.

This is not Orwellian Newspeak; our words can heal, and they can hurt. These are some examples of conventional doctorspeak and suggested alternatives from the video presentation by Alexander Blount, Ed. D.:

Chief Complaint = Main Concern

Suffers from = Struggles with

Refused to take = Decided against

Was noncompliant with = Didn’t see the value of

Didn’t keep appointment = Wasn’t able to be here

Arrived late = Was determined not to miss

There is a lot of talk these days in the U.S. about the Patient-Centered Medical Home. It begins here; with the way we see our patients as the center of the clinical work we do, indeed the justification for our own existence as doctors in our communities.