The best of Inside Medicine, 2022 (non-Covid edition).
Yesterday, I shared the best of my Covid-related Inside Medicine essays from 2022. Today, it’s time for everything else. In hindsight, we’ve covered a lot of terrain and I’m grateful that you’ve taken these journeys with me.
As with yesterday’s edition, I chose these pieces either because they were popular with readers or because they provided what I believe were unique perspectives at the time they were published, and which hopefully moved our thinking forward.
How to not kill Grandma (or anyone, including yourself) this Thanksgiving. This is a bit of a cheat, because it is kind of about Covid, but kind of about keeping ourselves and our families safe during the holiday season in general. A follow-up piece about how a diagnosis given to a young and healthy person probably did more to help a relative of the patient than the patient herself. Field Notes: How a young person's "unnecessary" ER visit may have saved a life during the holidays.
Inside Medicine covered the Mpox outbreak (formerly known as Monkeypox) carefully, in a series of essays. We were early to point out that there was very likely asymptomatic spread of the virus, but that did not mean that the virus was routinely airborne, and therefore was not necessarily destined to spread as widely as Covid-19 (Is this monkeypox strain more contagious? What have we learned and how worried should we be?). Later, we published a graph that Dr. Kristen Panthagani and I developed that shows how Mpox spreads through communities in different ways, depending on risks and behaviors (Monkeypox/Opoxid-22 started showing up in strange places. Then it mostly vanished. What happened?).
We also covered a handful of brand new studies on a wide variety of medical topics. There are thousands of new studies to chose from every week. So, when I decide to cover one here, it’s because a study reflects the best research practices and the results stand to change how we should treat patients (sometimes adding new options, other times ceasing to offer ones shown not to work). In the past few months we have covered new data on colonoscopies (Study finds colonoscopy only works if you have one), spinal cord stimulators for back pain (Spinal cord stimulators fail to show benefit in a bold new clinical trial), and innovations in CPR (A “shocking” development in CPR?) among others.
Probably the most popular Inside Medicine articles overall have been Field Notes essays, pieces where I write about and reflect on my work as a physician in the emergency room. Patients continue to teach, inspire, and surprise me. My goal is to take these experiences and use them educate and enlighten this readership, while honoring and respecting my patients. “Field Notes: Two questions about headaches that ER doctors always ask—and the one they don’t, but should” was an essay generated a lot of interest both on our website and elsewhere (including this nice summary of the essay published by Insider, formerly Business Insider). Because Field Notes pieces are so popular, I’ll do more of them in 2023.
If there are other pieces from 2022 worth sharing, please mention them in the comments. Also, if there are pieces by others from other sources that you thought were important, please share those too. This community is made stronger by its collective expertise (and voracious reading)!
Thank you for reading Inside Medicine. I’d like to pause for a special thanks to Benjy Renton, who has made so much of this newsletter possible via his skills, insights, and indefatigable willingness to work really weird and long hours when things absolutely have to happen. There are a bunch of other people I truly would like to name and thank for their help in 2022, but the list would be impossible to make without leaving someone important off. So I’ll leave it there and just say thank you to the entire community: whether you’re a reader, a contributor, or one of our partners at Bulletin or Substack, I’m proud that we’ve reached millions of eyes, and educated both the public, and public health leaders. With your continued support, we can make 2023 even more impactful. Thank you all!