First an interesting discussion of the convoluted reasons less than 10% of appropriate patients are getting the shingles vaccination. Why Patients Aren’t Getting the Shingles Vaccine By PAULINE W. CHEN, M.D. Published: June 10, 2010 in the New York Times. Then on a more pleasant subject, how to protect yourself from the sun. We’re not likely to think too much ...
Category Archives: Uncategorized
A Special Relationship
Physicians are taught that it is important to maintain an appropriate professional distance between ourselves and our patients. We deal with disease, death, and pain daily, and to emotionally survive need to compartmentalize our professional lives to some degree. Still as a family physician the relationships I have with patients are really what makes my ...
Grand Rounds again
I have started submitting a post some weeks to Grand Rounds. This is a collection of the weeks best medical posts from the blogosphere. This week The Examining Room of Dr. Charles hosts Grand Rounds, and he is using my post Seen a ...
Eradication of Polio – It’s Happening
I hope you enjoy this article in my weekend reading series. When I joined the Puyallup – South Hill Rotary Club in 1987 I was asked to donate to the Rotary International Foundation’s Polio Plus campaign, with the stated goal of eradication of polio from the world. I didn’t know much about Rotary yet, ...
Professional Victims
I often see patients in the office I think of as professional victims. They just seem to always have terrible luck. They make choices that might at face value seem fine, but seem to always work out poorly. Dr. Friedman in yesterday’s NY Times writes about a theory as to why these patients failure ...
Does Platelet Rich Plasma Therapy Really Work
Good question. It seems like getting platelet rich plasma (PRP) therapy is now a knee-jerk response for any high profile athlete who has a muscle or tendon injury. In the Pacific Northwest two of our local professional sports stars Brandon Roy (hamstring) of the Portland Trailblazers and the pride of Seattle Basketball and Cliff Lee ...
P4P: Easier Said than Done for Primary Care
P4P, pay for performance, compensate quality care. These are buzzwords in policy makers rhetoric these days, and for good reason. Everyone wants to promote high quality care and reward those who provide it, while encouraging those who don’t to get up to speed. The problem is defining quality, figuring out if an individual ...
Letter to the President
I was a supporter of President Obama, and have an open mind about health care reform, but have been really frustrated that what is going on in Washington seems all about what's best for the politicians, political parties and has little to do with what's best for America or Americans. Rob Lambert in Health ...
Junk food at schools. No more?
The only argument I’ve heard for having junk foods in the schools is that the profits from selling them are used to supplement our already lean school budgets. This is a pretty sad comment on our society if we need to entice our kids to eat unhealthy foods to fund our school programs. See this
Welcome to DrPullen.com
DrPullen.com is my venture into the on-line medical weblog field where I have yet to find a site I think is user friendly and oriented specifically for the informed patient and authored by an experienced, practicing primary care physician. I am inspired by kevinMD , a very good medical blog, but written primarily with a physician audience ...