All posts by Mark Crislip

Mark Crislip, MD has been a practicing Infectious Disease specialist in Portland, Oregon, from 1990 to 2023. He has been voted a US News and World Report best US doctor, best ID doctor in Portland Magazine multiple times, has multiple teaching awards and, most importantly,  the ‘Attending Most Likely To Tell It Like It Is’ by the medical residents at his hospital. His multi-media empire can be found at edgydoc.com.

Boundaries

Vacation then taxes have consumed my focus the last two weeks, and I have had little time to devote to issues of infectious diseases, much less SBM, so I will instead meander around a more philosophical terrain.  I feel guilty when I do not have a substantive, data driven post evaluating a paper or essay in detail, but some weeks there just...

/ April 5, 2013

Comprehending the Incomprehensible

Medicine is impossible. Really. The amount of information that flows out the interwebs is amazing and the time to absorb it is comparatively tiny. If you work, sleep and have a family, once those responsibilities are complete there is remarkably little time to keep up with the primary literature. I have made two of my hobbies (blogging and podcasting) dovetail with my...

/ March 22, 2013

Acupuncture and Allergic Rhinitis: Another Opportunity for Intellectual Sterility

You need to keep an open mind. A common suggestion offered to naysayers of nonsense. The usual retort concerns not letting one’s brain fall out. Evaluating SCAM’s is less about having an open mind and more about having standards, a conceptual framework that is used to interpret and analyze new information. One of the benefits of writing and reading topics covered by...

/ March 8, 2013

Warts

As this is published I am finishing the last day of a 12 day stretch covering my partner while he is off trying to get MDRTB and typhoid fever.  He is in India. I may have to autoclave him when he returns before I let him in the hospital.  Double the work means double the fun, but free time goes down by...

/ February 22, 2013

Honey Boo Boo

My son has been coughing for several weeks, and the cough will probably persist for another 2 or 3 weeks. Coughs last a long time. Patients think a cough will go away in less than a week but in reality they are likely to last several weeks. Coughs are a pain for the patient and an annoyance for the people around them....

/ February 8, 2013

One Flu Into the Cuckoo’s Nest

“I don’t seem able to get it straight in my mind….” ― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Influenza is going gangbusters at the moment. I like going to Google Flu trends as well as the CDC flu site to see what flu is doing. Using Google searches as a surrogate for infections is an interesting technique that public health...

/ January 25, 2013

SCAMlandia. CAM in Oregon.

I quite like Portlandia. I find it funny and it captures a part of Portland. I recognize large swaths of the city’s culture in the show. Other representations of the city I recognize less. Sunset publishes beautiful photographs of the NW, but when I look at the photos I think, that section of the city never looks that good. It is quite...

/ January 11, 2013

What’s past is prologue

Today marks the five year anniversary of the blog. I was not part of the initial stable of writers, my first entry published Jan 31. As I remember it shortly thereafter they browbeat me into writing twice a month. I had a lot of hesitancy participating as I was uncertain I could keep up with the twice monthly writing requirements. I am...

/ January 1, 2013

780.6. What is a fever?

You can tell what a doctor does for a living by the ICD-9 codes they have memorized. There is an ICD-9 code for nearly every medical condition. Weightlessness is 994.9. Must be there for NASA, I have yet to see a weightless patient. Decapitation by guillotine is E978. There, I suppose, in case Marat returns from the dead. There is an ICD-9...

/ December 28, 2012

Disingenuous: Deconstruction of a naturopathic white paper

Science is the Concept by which we measure our reality I don’t believe in magic I don’t believe in I-ching… I just believe in science…and that reality. John Lennon. Sort of. As regular readers of the blog are aware, I am science/reality based. I think the physical and basic sciences provide an excellent understanding of reality at the level of human experience....

/ December 14, 2012