 “Are you ready to ruum-ble? This week here at Doc Gurley is the Grand Rounds Smack Down edition, where the best contenders of the health care blogosphere wrestle down and dirty with tough, scary topics. Just like being in the ring, there’s no orderly progression of characters here – this ain’t ballet, folks. At any moment, something huge and impressive could come flying out of left field and hit you (ka-pow!) right between the eyes! There’s no first, no last – we’re here to entertain (and take out a few bad guys while we’re at it). We’ve got a lot of contestants, oops, I mean, submissions, vaulting into the ring. One thing’s for sure – if you hang with it to the end of this week’s match, right up to the point when the lights dim in the arena, you’ll be entertained. Continue reading Grand Rounds Smack Down
The words just don’t want to come out of my mouth – hang on a sec while I give my chest a thump – okay, here goes: It’s time for all of us to stand up for our local smokers’ rights. See, I’m passionately anti-tobacco. I watched cigarettes kill my dad. I see patients struggle with hideous, smoking-caused diseases, and still can’t quit smoking. This isn’t rare – we’re talking every single day I’m at clinic. When you multiply the numbers across America, the total devastation from cigarettes (and the total profit) is mind-boggling. I see patients with lots of different kinds of addictions, but smoking is one deep-rooted parasite once it gets its claws into you. I also see secondhand smoke horrors – both wicked asthma in household members, and lung disease in spouses who’ve lived with heavy smokers without ever taking a puff. But, proving you should never say never, here I am, Doc Gurley, calling on all Americans to stand up and defend your local smoker. What the heck could bring me to this point? Here’s what:
Continue reading Gack! I Never Thought I’d Say It…
 It was a grey day. I broke my fingernail. Sartre-like ennui pervaded my very soul, seeping through me like a miasma – much like the way an ominous green spill pervades a super-absorbent Hefty-brand towelette during Saturday morning TV ads. We’re talking a total soul suck. With a death-rattle sigh, I dragged my pale [...]
 This week’s Grand Rounds roundup of posts from medical blogs is loosely based on the limbic system and emotion. it is hosted at revolutionhealth by Dr. Val and is a HUGE roundup with lots of great posts. Go take a look…
I, Doc Gurley, spent the last two days playing surgeon. Eleven hours each day, I went into a temporary emergency tent and shivered over hot coffee. There were lectures, then practical skills stations where I did procedures on rubber dummies while pre-eminent surgeons watched and critiqued me until I got it right. Let’s just say that I resuscitated so many dummies, store manikins the world over now worship me as a goddess. I’m known as the Mass Casualty Queen of Rubber. So why would any self-respecting board-certified internist subject themselves to this level of fumbling humiliation? I mean, it’s not like we internists ever get to stand around and critique surgeons on their choice of antibiotics, or even (heaven-help-us), their EKG interpretation skills. Well, here’s why and it’s an issue that applies to every one of us: Continue reading Playing Surgeon
 Grand Rounds in medicine often means a morgue-cold auditorium, a sea of starched white coats, and staccato squeaks from irritable chairs. Doc Gurley is hosting April 29th’s Grand Rounds of the medical blogosphere with a more WWF-type approach: Grand Rounds Smack Down Week. Do you want to take on a behemoth topic with some [...]
 All you need is a cup of tea! This week’s Grand Rounds of the best of the health blogosphere is at Women’s Health News. Ms. Walden did the kind of witty, clear, and compelling summary that only a medical librarian (instead of we mere mortals) could hope to achieve. The bar has been set [...]
In a sad follow-up to the Doc Gurley article, Is Your Medicine Contaminated?, independent authorities have now increased the number of deaths due to contaminated heparin from 19 to over 100. The manufacturer, Baxter, hopes we’ll believe claims there were only 4 (not a big surprise to those of us who are familiar with drug companies cynical). This hot-button issue – the massive off-shoring of pharmaceutical production to unregulated third world countries in order to increase already-obscene profits – still seems to simmer below the mainstream news. Lots of articles exist about contaminated heparin, and almost nothing is said about the reason why – the cheap unregulated China production of our supposedly pure medicines. Keep in mind that we taxpayers are obligated to fly FDA inspectors to China to regulate pharmaceuticals there at our expense. For that reason, even though the squalid, nausea-inducing conditions of heparin production in China that this new article revealed were deeply disturbing, Continue reading Heparin Horrors
 I’ll bet some of you regular Doc Gurley readers already guessed that we’d be handing out a BOGUS Award to that widely-publicized example of deeply flawed research–the study stating that you can tell if someone’s into love or lust, purely from their facial features. Slut or not? – just look at the width of her eyes. Yes siree, folks, this study joins those august embarrassing fields of pseudo-science – phrenology and eugenics – where claims were made in earlier centuries about what “data” you could get from face/head features. Bizarre indicators, from the bumps on your noggin, to racist descriptions about the width of your nostrils, were claimed to be clear indicators of such “obvious” things as intelligence and stamina.
But maybe you’re asking yourself, how could a study be that bad if even Scientific American covered it? Continue reading Bogus Sluts
Another Doc Gurley question has been answered at the (in)famous Dave Barry for President Forum! Yes, actual words typed by an actual comedic genius. What’s with the Dave Barry obsession? Well, giggles, mayhem, and snorting-milk-out-the-nose are all fine symptoms of a successfully cultivated Joy Habit. Check it out! (while we go get a mop [...]
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About The Author  Doc Gurley is a Board-certified Internist physician and the only Harvard Medical School graduate to have been awarded a Shoney’s Ten-Step Pin for documented excellence in waitressing. Find out more.Doc Gurley Library of Medeos
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