"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." - HL Mencken
====
"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." - Confucius
====
"The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease" - Sir William Osler
====
" The best test of a person's character is how he or she treats those with less power." - Bob Sutton
====
"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them - well, I have others." - Groucho Marx
====
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
====
"It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them" - Friedrich Nietzsche
====
"Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple." - Charles Mingus
====
"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - Albert Einstein
====
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
====
"This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around." - Talking Heads, Life During Wartime
====
"What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour. This is the whole Torah; all the rest is commentary. Go and learn it." - Hillel, Talmud, Shabbath 31a
====
"You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing." - Thomas Sowell
====
"An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup." - HL Mencken
====
"If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." - Abraham Maslow
====
"A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not to dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves." - Herbie Hancock
====
"There are no facts, only interpretations." - Nietzsche
====
"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't." - Anatole France
====
"In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
====
Workouts by month - Goal 200 from 11/1/09 through 10/31/10
A note to the professors, from the "real" world, on the use of ICDs in a fee for service community... http://ow.ly/1jaPy - great postMarch 13, 2010 2:19
RT @paulinechen: New "Doctor and Patient"; Learning to Keep Patients Safe in a Culture of Fear http://nyti.ms/bYA14V - blog post comingMarch 12, 2010 1:35
RT @tom_peters: @kevinmd Spoken like an MD. - true primary care is very complex - it is not simple care -March 11, 2010 12:43
RT @efalchuk: Seriously, what is Nancy Pelosi Talking About? http://bit.ly/9sHSc2 #healthreform #hcr #healthcare think Dazed and ConfusedMarch 10, 2010 7:53
Obama Says Health Overhaul Should Trump Politics - http://nyti.ms/bwKRyo - and he is correctMarch 8, 2010 7:28
@BertDecker multiples of 37 - trivial - any factor of 111 would factor into the others. The key here is that 37 * 3 = 111March 7, 2010 9:00
RT @dmrind: Meta-analysis and New Knowledge http://bit.ly/awMtmT important and well statedMarch 7, 2010 12:10
@autolycos while books need no batteries - they are expensive to produce and use resourcesMarch 6, 2010 3:02
Infectious disease experts worry about antibiotic resistance. Generally they err on the side of underusing antibiotics. The National Health Service in Great Britain now wonders whether this movement leads to difficulties. UK considers antibiotic policy
A big rise in pneumonia deaths may be linked to a clampdown on the use of antibiotics for coughs and sore throats, say researchers.
University of Aberdeen scientists found pneumonia deaths rose by 50% during a five-year period in the late 1990s.
Doctors were told in 1998 to curb antibiotic use amid concern about growing bacterial resistance.
An expert government advisory panel is now considering whether to revamp its guidance on the use of the drugs.
This study raises the interesting question of errors of comission versus errors of omission. Have we become so worried about antibiotic overuse that patient care is suffering? These findings are worrisome and deserve careful validation. We have been quick to criticize primary care physicians for dispensing antibiotics too quickly. Maybe they were smarter than we thought!!!
Another case of “the dose is the poison”? I want antibiotics, but I don’t want to lose those friendly little critters in my digestive tract that let me handle milk… As to drug-resistant strains arising, wouldn’t they do so at any level of usage? Slower to spread and/or fewer types, perhaps, but occuring in any case.
Read the small print and the tables. First, this was a study funded totally by one of the biggest manufacturers of antibiotics, ie Abbott. Is is any surprise then that it found that less antibiotics are apparently bad? I say apparently because it did not show this – if you look at the raw data, it shows that pneumonia was increasing at the same time as antibiotic use was on the increase for the first few years. They’ve used a very elaborate statistical model to tweak out a weak negative association between antibiotic use and pneumonia, in the midst of many other confounding factors. What it actually shows is that influenza is by far the most important factor in relation to pneumonia. It’s also done a good job of planting a seed of doubt in the minds of many physicians. Money well spent for Abbott, obviously.
2 Responses to The danger of decreasing antibiotic use
John Anderson
December 17th, 2003 at 8:51 am
Another case of “the dose is the poison”? I want antibiotics, but I don’t want to lose those friendly little critters in my digestive tract that let me handle milk… As to drug-resistant strains arising, wouldn’t they do so at any level of usage? Slower to spread and/or fewer types, perhaps, but occuring in any case.
Mike
December 18th, 2003 at 9:34 pm
Read the small print and the tables. First, this was a study funded totally by one of the biggest manufacturers of antibiotics, ie Abbott. Is is any surprise then that it found that less antibiotics are apparently bad? I say apparently because it did not show this – if you look at the raw data, it shows that pneumonia was increasing at the same time as antibiotic use was on the increase for the first few years. They’ve used a very elaborate statistical model to tweak out a weak negative association between antibiotic use and pneumonia, in the midst of many other confounding factors. What it actually shows is that influenza is by far the most important factor in relation to pneumonia. It’s also done a good job of planting a seed of doubt in the minds of many physicians. Money well spent for Abbott, obviously.