Articles related to PRACTICE PEARLS

Whether prescribing them for diabetes or weight loss, what factors should you consider when choosing among the seven approved GLP-1 agonist formulations? This concise review highlights the variables.

The 2022 Physician Specialty Data Report from the Association of American Medical Colleges is now available. It tracks practicing physicians by specialty and compares the numbers to a five-year-ago report to calculate a percentage change within each specialty. When the top ten specialties with the most active physicians are compared to the top ten specialties with the fewest, it is clear that the least populated are growing the fastest.

Short appointment times, complex patient cases, stressors in electronic health records, a lack of control, and a poor work-life balance can all have a negative impact on patients’ health and even lead to physicians leaving their practices. Physician burnout reached 63% in 2021, demonstrating how the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the problem. Recognizing the characteristics of zero-burnout practices and translating them into individual professional environments is one potential burnout intervention.

A conversation with Sayeh Lavasani, MD, MS, a medical oncologist specializing in breast cancer at the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Cente, in Duarte, California, who discusses how clinical pathways are developed and used at the cancer center, how the pathways for patients with HER2-low breast cancer are utilized, recent updates in the HER2-low treatment landscape, the challenges and level of evidence needed to incorporate new therapeutic approaches into the clinical pathway, and the challenges and crafty balancing that’s needed between standardizing treatment decisions across the population and optimizing care for individual patients.

Fewer than half of patients with celiac disease have characteristic GI symptoms. The diagnosis is often complicated by atypical symptoms such as constipation. How can clinicians improve their diagnostic abilities? This review and summary provides practical tips for identifying, diagnosing, and treating patients.

The CBC, ordered hundreds of millions of times a year in the US alone, typically reports 19 different values, some of which are redundant and inconsequential. These authors suggest three distinct CBCs. [Subscription Required]