Doc Gurley

It’s been a big week for celebrity sorrow. As you’re contemplating the loss of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, be sure to head over to SFGate to check out the Doc Gurley health tips we can all learn from celebrity health coverage.
1) First, there’s Farrah’s Gift: Outing the Tumor That Dare Not Speak Its Name [...]

We’ve all had the experience – that perky voice on the other end of the phone who says “sure, we can give a new-patient appointment with your assigned primary care doctor – how’s eight months from now? Does that work for you?”
Even then, most of us look around the packed waiting rooms, seething during our [...]

Spring is in the air – and so are the musings of Click and Clack. Check out their latest article titled How To Ask Your Mechanic Out On A Date. There are sooo many mechanic-doctor job parallels, everything from the “checking under your hood,” to “preventive maintenance” – parallels  which, of course, lead to the [...]

Whoa! Weird and wonderful medical news this week! The New England Journal of Medicine published three

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simultaneous reports proving the existence of a veritable Loch Ness monster of physiology – the identification, at long last, of “brown fat” in adults. Say what? See, the conventional wisdom for many many years [...]

There’s a great article today talking about the uninsured’s perceived lack of political power. Much of what the article

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says feels true – I can certainly attest that people who lack health insurance often see it as a shameful thing – a statement about their own failures instead of something they [...]

Money, money, money – it’s all you hear about in the news. A billion here, a trillion there. Before you know it, we’re

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talking serious bonus. The Huffington Post published an article about how smokers are good for the economy. Since they die so conveniently young, smokers save taxpayers a lot of [...]

Ah, the demons of cost -effectiveness have reared their snake-writhing heads again. Now don’t get me wrong – Doc

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Gurley has actually done some cost-effectiveness research in her day: here and here. That experience taught her that people who do this type of research for a living (not all of them, but most) are [...]

Should your basic healthcare be non-profit? And is that even a major consideration? I mean, after all, isn’t “profit” a good

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motivation for a healthcare plan? This issue came to the forefront of a PBS documentary about healthcare around the world – and apparently got the person who made the documentary cut out of [...]

It’s that time of week again! Head on over to CodeBlog for a round-up of the best of the healthcare blogosphere. This

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week’s host is a Tales of a Nurse site – with an ICU nurse host and a behind-the-scene look at healthcare. After you’ve gotten your weekly grand rounds fix, check [...]

We had a great Hello Doc question from a reader*:
Could you define “normal”?
Luckily for Doc Gurley, this question wasn’t a request for a metaphysical definition of human non-weirdness (Doc Gurley, in fact, loves human weirdness), but was, instead, a medical question. In other words, our reader continues -
“I had my vitamin D tested in [...]