Cindy Fei, MD
Peer Reviewed
A 63-year-old woman with hypertension presents to your clinic for routine follow-up. She came across an online article regarding C-reactive protein and its purported link to heart disease, and she asks you whether she should be tested for …
By: Miguel A. Saldivar, MD
Peer ReviewedÂ
“Indeterminate.” Many clinicians have expressed frustration when reading this word on a Quantiferon-TB Gold test result. The obligate follow-up question is: what is the next best step? …
By Shannon Chiu, MD
Peer Reviewed
The annual incidence of infective endocarditis (IE) is estimated to be 3 to 9 cases per 100,000 persons in developed countries [1-2]. Neurologic complications are the most …
By M tanner
Many  bacteria live in and on me—I’ve always known that. But when I learned that bacteria make up 90% of the cells in my body, it made me feel so sucio, so unclean.
I went through my …
By Shilpa Mukunda, MD
Peer Reviewed
On my first day on inpatient medicine at the VA Hospital, Mr. P came in with an oozing foot ulcer. Mr. P, a 60-year-old man with …
By Rachel Kaplan Hoffmann, M.D., M.S.Ed., and Keith Hoffmann, J.D.
Peer Reviewed
On December 6, 2013, a two-year-old boy living in southeastern Guinea became the first victim of …
Joshua Horton
Peer Reviewed
We are not winning the war against cancer, if war is even an appropriate metaphor. When Richard Nixon signed the National Cancer Act into effect in 1971, many …
By Miguel A. Saldivar, MD
Peer ReviewedÂ
When a patient with diabetes comes into a clinic or hospital, it is not uncommon to hear the question, “Is he/she on an angiotensin-converting-enzyme (ACE) inhibitor (ACEI) or an angiotensin-receptor blocker (ARB)?” Most …