patient care – Scientists Talk Funny

Behind the scenes with a Stanford pediatric surgeon

In a new series, “Behind the Scenes,” we’re inviting Stanford Medicine physicians, nurses, researchers and staff to share a glimpse of their day.

As a science writer, I talk to a lot of health care providers about their work. But I’ve often wondered what it is really like to be a surgeon. So I was excited to speak with pediatric surgeon Stephanie Chao, MD, about her day.

Chao is a pediatric general surgeon, an assistant professor of surgery and the trauma medical director for Stanford Children’s Health. In addition to performing surgeries on children of all ages, she has a range of research interests, including how to reduce gun-related deaths in children and the hospital cost associated with pediatric firearm injuries.

Morning routine
On days that I operate, I get up between 5:50 and 6 a.m., depending on whether I hit the snooze button. I typically don’t eat breakfast. I don’t drink coffee because I don’t want to get a tremor. I’m out the door by 6:30 a.m. and at the hospital by 7 a.m. I usually go by the bedside of the first patient I’m going to operate on to say hi. The patient is in the operating room by 7:30 a.m. and my cases start.

On non-surgical days, it’s more chaotic. I have a 3-year-old and 1-year-old. So every day there’s a jigsaw puzzle as to whether my husband or I stay to get the kids ready for preschool, and who comes home early.

Part of Stephanie Chao’s day involves checking on patients, including this newborn.

In the operating room
The operating room is the place where I have the privilege of helping children feel better. It’s a very calming place, like a temple. When I walk through the operating room doors, the rest of the world becomes quiet. Even if it is a high-intensity case when the patient is very sick, I know there is a team of nurses, scrub techs and anesthesiologists used to working together in a well-orchestrated fashion. So even when the unexpected arises, we can focus on the patient with full confidence that we’ll find a solution.

There are occasions when babies are so sick that we need silence in the operating room. Everyone becomes hyper-attuned to all the beeps on the monitors. When patients are not as critically sick, I often play a Pandora station that I created called “Happy.” I started it with Pharrell Williams’ “Happy” and then Pandora pulled in other upbeat songs, including a bunch of Taylor Swift songs, so everyone thinks I’m a big Taylor Swift fan.

The OR staff call me by my first name. I believe that if everyone is relaxed and feels like they have an equal say in the procedure, we work better as a well-oiled machine for the benefit of the patient.

“The OR staff call me by my first name,” Stephanie Chao said.

Favorite task
Some of the most rewarding times of my day are when I sit down with patients and their families to hear their concerns, to reassure them and to help them understand what to expect — and hopefully to make a scary situation a little less so. As a parent, I realize just how hard it is to entrust one’s child completely in the hands of another. I also like to see patients in the hospital as they’re recovering.

Favorite time
The best part of the day is when I come home. When I open the door into the house, my kids recognize that sound and I hear their little footsteps as they run towards the door, shrieking with joy.

Evening ritual
When my husband and I get home, on nights I am not on call, I cook dinner in the middle of the chaos of hearing about the kids’ day. Hopefully, we “sit down” to eat by 6:20 or 6:30 p.m., and I mean that term loosely. It’s a circus, but eventually everyone is somewhat fed.

And then we do bath time and bedtime. There’s a daily negotiation with my three-year-old on how many books we read before bed. On school nights, she’s allowed three books but she tries to negotiate for 10.

Eventually, we get both kids down for the night. Then my husband and I clean up the mess of the day and try to have a coherent conversation with each other. But by then both of us are exhausted. I try to log on again to finish some work, read or review papers. I usually go to sleep around 11 p.m.

Managing it all
When I can carve out time to do relaxing things for myself, like go to the gym, that is great. But it’s rare and I remind myself that I am blessed with a job that I love and a wonderfully active family.

The result sometimes feels like chaos, but I don’t want to wish my life away waiting for my kids to get older and for life to get easier. Trying to live in the moment, and embracing it, is how I find balance.

Photos by Rachel Baker

This is a reposting of my Scope blog story, courtesy of Stanford School of Medicine.

Celebrating cancer survivors by telling their stories

Photo of Martin Inderbitzen by Michael Goldstein

Neurobiologist and activist Martin Inderbitzen, PhD, began his talk with a question: “Did you ever face a life situation that was totally overwhelming?” Most of his audience likely answered yes, since he was speaking to cancer survivors and their families at a Stanford event called Celebrating Cancer Survivors.

The evening focused on life after cancer and highlighted Stanford’s Cancer Survivorship Program, which helps survivors and their families transition to life after treatment by providing multidisciplinary services and health care. Lidia Schapira, MD, a medical oncologist and director of the program, said they aim to “help people back into health.”

But to me, the heart of the event was the personal stories openly shared by the attendees while standing in line for the food buffet or waiting for the speeches to begin. As a Hodgkin’s survivor who was treated at Stanford twenty-five years ago, I swapped “cancer stories” with my comrades.

Inderbitzen understands firsthand the importance of sharing such cancer survival stories. In 2012, he was diagnosed at the age of 32 with pancreatic cancer. From an online search, he quickly learned that 95 percent of people with his type of cancer die within a few years. However, his doctor gave him hope by mentioning a similar patient, who was successfully treated some years earlier and is now happily skiing in the mountains.

“This picture of someone skiing in the mountains became my mantra,” Inderbitzen explained. “I had all these bad statistics against me, but then I also had this one story. And I thought, maybe I can also be one story, because this story was somehow the personification of a possibility. It inspired me to rethink how I saw my own situation.”

Later, Inderbitzen publicly shared his own cancer journey, which touched many people who reached out to him. This inspired him to found MySurvivalStory.org — an initiative that documents inspiring cancer survival stories to help other cancer patients better cope with their illness. He and his wife quit their jobs, raised some funds and began traveling around the globe to find and record short videos of cancer survivors from different cultures.

“We share the stories in formats that people can consume when they have ‘chemo brain’ — like podcasts you can listen to and short videos you can process even when you’re tired,” he said. He added, “These stories are powerful because they provide us with something or someone to aspire to — someone who is a bit ahead of us, so we think “I can do that.’”

Inderbitzen isn’t the only one to recognize the empowering impact of telling your cancer story. For example, the Stanford Center for Integrative Medicine compiles some patient stories on their Surviving Cancer website. And all of these stories have the potential to help both the teller and listener.

However, Inderbitzen offers the following advice when sharing your cancer story:

“Change the story you tell and you will be able to change the life you live. So that’s a very powerful concept. And I would like to challenge you and also encourage you that every day when you wake up and get out of bed and things are not looking good, remind yourself that it’s actually you who chooses which story to tell. And choosing a better story doesn’t mean that you’re ignoring reality. No, it just means that you’re giving yourself a chance.”

This is a reposting of my Scope blog story, courtesy of Stanford School of Medicine.

Inaccurate direct-to-consumer raw genetic data can harm patients, new research suggests

Whether or not you’ve ever had genetic testing, you probably know someone that has. Millions of people each year have their DNA analyzed by companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com, seeking out personalized information about their heritage, health and other traits.

“The general public is excited about genetics because it can tell us a lot about our past ancestry and, if the right technology is used, about our future — such as the likelihood of developing certain health problems,” said Tia Moscarello, a genetic counselor with Stanford’s Center for Inherited Cardiovascular Disease. “These tests are popular for good reason: many people want to be proactive about their health without spending a lot of money or making a trip to the doctor’s office to do it.”

Typically, these direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic tests are less expensive than more comprehensive, clinical-grade genetic tests obtained through a health care provider.

However, the Food and Drug Administration limits what these companies can say about a consumer’s health. So many people download their raw genetic data obtained from the company, and then upload it to another company’s website for additional interpretation. But their raw data come with a disclaimer stating the information is not validated for accuracy nor intended for medical use.

“To our understanding, raw genetic data doesn’t go through quality control. We and the DTC labs know that raw data may not be accurate,” Moscarello said. For instance, a small study recently showed that 40 percent of genetic variants identified in direct-to-consumer raw data and sent for clinical confirmation were false positives — meaning that the genetic variants weren’t really present.

Moscarello has personally witnessed the impact of these false positives on patients and their families. In a recent commentary in Genetics in Medicine, she and her colleagues describe two cases of false positives seen at Stanford and two more seen at other institutions. These patients received raw data with genetic variants known to be associated with inherited heart conditions that would predispose them to sudden death, she said. Fortunately, a clinical lab determined that the results were incorrect.

Moscarello said she and her co-authors wrote the commentary to call attention to the potential harms of direct-to-consumer raw data interpretation, which extend beyond the potential for inaccurate results. She explained:

“Finding out that you or a family member are at risk for an inherited heart condition can be a very emotional, life-changing event. To go through that without an expert to talk to, or perhaps without support systems nearby, was challenging for our patients. They had to wait for an appointment with a genetic counselor who could explain the test and its limitations, and to provide support. That is usually provided prior to genetic testing, so patients can decide if they would like to proceed.”

The commentary also discussed the impact that DTC testing is having on the health care system. For the four cases, this burden included the time and expense of four clinical-grade genetic tests, several echocardiograms and electrocardiograms for each patient, multiple visits with physician specialists, an MRI, and the implant and subsequent explant of an implantable cardioverter defibrillator, Moscarello said.

So what can be done? The authors call for more research to determine the frequency and impact of people being affected by false positives in their raw genetic data interpretations. When a result with potential clinical significance is found, they recommend that it be sent for confirmation to a clinical-grade lab. This should occur before the consumer has to undergo costly clinical evaluations and tests, she said, concluding:

“It is clear that DTC genetic testing is here to stay, and for good reason. So it’s important to focus on maximizing the benefits of such large-scale, clinician-free testing, while minimizing the harms to consumers.

Collaboration between clinicians, consumers and the DTC genetic testing companies is a priority. I hope that DTC genetic testing companies will work with clinical genetics experts to create educational resources — so that consumers and non-specialist physicians know the data may be inaccurate, and what to do next if something is found.”

This is a reposting of my Scope blog story, courtesy of Stanford School of Medicine.

Dentistry in the hospital: A Q&A

Photo of Dyani Gaudilliere (right) in OR; by Vladimir Nekhendzy

In the U.S., medicine and dentistry are separate — they typically have different insurance systems, training regimes and workplaces. So I was intrigued when I heard about hospital dentists. To learn more about what they do, I spoke with Dyani Gaudilliere, DMD, a clinical assistant professor of surgery and chief of the dental section at Stanford.

Why did you choose to combine dentistry with medicine?

“I started on the path towards dentistry in my teens, planning to become an orthodontist. I became increasingly interested in public health, with the goal of treating underserved populations.

At my dental school (Harvard), the dental and medical school courses were combined for the first two years with the goal of fostering a more integrated approach to dentistry, which prepared me well for my current work.

The split between medicine and dentistry is, in fact, completely artificial. The bacterial diseases of the teeth and gingiva affect the entire immune system and can cause serious systemic consequences. In addition, many systemic diseases and medications have oral manifestations.”

What do you do at Stanford?

“The majority of our patients at Stanford are being treated for cancer, organ transplantation, cardiac disease or joint replacement. Our goal is to rid these patients of bacterial disease in their teeth and gums prior to their treatments. It may be risky to treat them outside the hospital, without access to the their full medical records or emergency services. Lack of dental insurance can also be a barrier for patients whose chronic disease prevents them from being employed.”

Can you tell me more about your patients?

“One large category of patients we see are those with cancer of the head and neck. Targeted radiation to this area and chemotherapy have serious long-term side effects, ranging from dry mouth resulting in rampant tooth decay to severe jaw infections. For this reason, we perform dental examination and patient education prior to these treatments. We also partner with the head and neck surgeons to remove infected teeth during their cancer resection surgery. And we create special oral positioning devices to aid the radiation oncologists in spacing and immobilizing the tissues during radiation therapy.

We also see patients before medical treatments that will leave them immunocompromised, such as chemotherapy or organ transplantation. Chronic tooth or gum infections can suddenly become life threatening in a patient who is immunocompromised.

A third example is trauma. It is common for patients to get in minor bike accidents and fly right over their handlebars onto their teeth. We see these patients in the emergency department urgently in order to put the teeth and supporting bone back into place and then stabilize them with cemented splints.”

Are there many hospital dentists?

“I believe there isn’t enough awareness of the medical necessity of dental care, nor are there enough hospital dentists. Some hospitals are lucky to be affiliated with dental schools, whereas most have no in-house or emergency dental team at all. We regularly receive patients transferred from outside hospitals with large infections or oral trauma, because these hospitals didn’t have anybody with the right expertise to treat the conditions.

There are a lot of barriers we need to cross in order to fully integrate dentistry and medicine, but I think this integration is way overdue.”

What is your view on the separation between dentistry and medicine?

“The reason for the separation seems to be a combination of history and politics. Tooth extractions and other surgeries were historically performed by barber-surgeons rather than physicians, and oral care developed as a separate track from care of literally every other part of the body. Fast forward to today and you have dentists lobbying to sustain this separation in order to spare their profession from the regulations and changes occurring in the medical care world.

The idea that dentists would not need medical knowledge is laughable considering how much surgery they perform. Dentists who don’t understand medications and their mechanisms would not last long after their patient on blood thinners loses pints of blood after an extraction.”

This is a reposting of my Scope blog story, courtesy of Stanford School of Medicine.

How to improve care for LGBT patients

No one facing health concerns should have to worry about receiving inequitable care because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. But studies and surveys show that many lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals experience discrimination by healthcare providers — including clinicians who refuse to provide needed care, refuse to touch them or use excessive precautions, are disrespectful or simply blame them for their health status.

Fortunately, healthcare providers can improve clinical care of their LGBT patients by taking proactive steps, as outlined in a recent viewpoint in JAMA. In particular, Alexia Torke, MD, and Jennifer Carnahan, MD, professors of medicine at the Indiana University Center for Aging Research, focus in the paper on how to optimize care for older LGBT adults, who are the first generation to be more open about their sexual orientation or gender identity.

The authors recommend that clinicians use inclusive language, such as using a patient’s preferred name and pronoun and asking about a spouse or partner regarding marital status. Forms disclosing sex should also include options for transgender patients, such as “male-to-female,” they say.

In addition, they recommend that physicians learn about the medical concerns specific to LGBT patients, such as hormone treatment and gender affirming surgery for transgender individuals. They also state that screening and diagnosis for medical conditions should be based on a person’s anatomy rather than their gender identity, giving the example that a female-to-male transgender patient is at risk of gynecologic cancers if he has not had a hysterectomy.

Torke and Carnahan also indicate that clinicians should better understand the unequal treatment that many sexual and gender minority patients face, which can have financial, social and health consequences. For instance, these individuals may not have access to health insurance due to employment discrimination or as an unrecognized spouse.

They also recommend that LGBT-friendly clinicians register as a “safe physician” with organizations like the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association.

A key to improving care for these patients is training, according to the authors and other experts. So the Human Rights Campaign has established best practices for health care organizations and provides free online training for healthcare providers.

The campaign also evaluates the implementation of these best practices and publishes an annual report. In the 2017 report, almost 600 healthcare facilities participated in the related survey and more than 900 non-participating hospitals were also researched. Happily, over 300 of the participating facilities were rated as a “leader in LGBTQ healthcare equality” with a score of 100 — including Stanford Health Care.

The authors conclude in the paper:

“Although lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender older adults face barriers to good health and health care, clinicians can take proactive steps to improve the care they deliver. These steps include education about prior discrimination and major health needs, as well as policies that ensure respect for the individual patients and equal treatment in all health care settings.”

This is a reposting of my Scope blog story, courtesy of Stanford School of Medicine.

Commentary expresses “building resentment against the shackles” of electronic health records

2048px-Stethoscope_and_Laptop_Computer_-_Nci-vol-9713-300 — Photo by Daniel Sone

Current electronic health records, also known as EHRs, have many failings. That’s according to a commentary written by Stanford faculty members Donna Zulman, MD; Abraham Verghese, MD; and Nigam Shah, MBBS, PhD, that appears today in JAMA.

Zulman, assistant professor of medicine, elaborated in a recent email:

“Many physicians are frustrated with the dominant role of EHRs in today’s clinical practice, which is experienced physically in the exam room in the form of a computer that sits between the doctor and patient.

While EHRs facilitate certain tasks, such as medication orders and medical record review, they’ve shifted clinical care away from the profound interactions and relationships that motivate many physicians to pursue careers in medicine. Our objective in this essay was to describe the need for EHRs to evolve in a way that frees physicians to focus on the caring that only they, as humans, are equipped to provide.”

According to the commentary, specific failings of EHRs include: lengthy records that don’t prioritize meaningful information, the generation of too many non-urgent alerts that continually interrupt physician workflow and the absence of key information about patients’ environmental and behavioral stressors. EHRs are basically “designed for billing” rather than easy use by healthcare providers, they write.

Zulman added:

“Many record systems house data for large populations that could potentially inform treatment decisions for individual patients. By synthesizing information about other patients with similar demographic and clinical characteristics, EHRs could provide recommendations to help guide therapy decisions when traditional evidence is lacking. Expanding the types of information in EHRs to include social and behavioral determinants of health would greatly enrich the data available for these purposes, since we know that these factors are often fundamental to a patient’s treatment response and health outcomes.”

The authors also describe ways to improve how information is presented in EHRs, particularly when a patient has a complex medical history. For instance, they suggest capturing the key events of a prolonged illness in a single graph, so physicians and patients can easily visualize the clinical course of the disease and treatment. Overall, they argue that existing technology can be used to more effectively track, synthesize and visualize EHR information.

The authors concluded in their piece:

“There is building resentment against the shackles of the present EHR; every additional click inflicts a nick on physicians’ morale.

Current records miss opportunities to harness available data and predictive analytics to individualize treatment. Meanwhile, sophisticated advances in technology are going untapped. Better medical record systems are needed that are dissociated from billing, intuitive and helpful, and allow physicians to be fully present with their patients.”

This is a reposting of my Scope blog story, courtesy of Stanford School of Medicine.

Most primary care doctors have favorite patients, study finds

As a teacher, I try to treat all my students equally but I definitely have favorites. I’m sure other teachers have favorite students too, so it makes sense to learn that physicians have favorite patients.

A team of researchers led by Joy Lee, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, interviewed 25 primary care physicians who worked in clinical settings within the Johns Hopkins medical system about their favorite patients. The participating physicians were predominantly white and about evenly split between male and female.

The doctors were a bit uncomfortable with the term ‘favorite patient,’ the researchers reported in Patient Education and Counseling. It raised concerns regarding boundaries and favoritism. However, all but three of the participating physicians admitted to having favorite patients.

The goal of the study was to identify the common attributes of these physicians’ favorite patients and examine how having favorite patients impacts their physician-patient relationships.

Who were the favorites? Surprisingly, they weren’t typically the most compliant patients or the ones most similar to the doctors. Instead, they were long-term patients who spent more time with their physician while going through a major illness. So the doctors were very familiar with their favorite patients’ personalities and health histories — allowing them to provide the best care.

“For patients, these findings highlight the importance of having a usual source of care, a primary care doctor with whom they can establish a relationship,” said Lee in a recent news release. “Favorite patients might not be consistently sick, but when a crisis comes they have an existing relationship to work off of.”

Of course having favorites isn’t the same as playing favorites. The participating physicians argued that their awareness of having both favorite and challenging patients helps them prevent favoring the care of certain patients over others. They also generally like most of their patients.

“This concern demonstrates that physicians are striving to be fair and to give all their patients the best possible care,” Lee said. “We discovered that doctors really thought about their relationship with patients, which is encouraging from a patient perspective. Their thinking really humanizes the patient-physician relationship.”

This is a reposting of my Scope blog story, courtesy of Stanford School of Medicine.

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: