One might say I’m on a roll. Halfway through the year I have already broken my 2017 record for best year. I have published three of my most read ever blog posts in the past three months. But, even combined, they don’t surpass my 2015 piece “Normal Blood Pressure”. If that one was a movie, it would be characterized as a sleeper. It describes a housecall on a snowy day in Van Buren. And I guess it is a fair little snapshot of the essence of rural medicine at the northern edge of my adopted homeland.
BOOKS BY HANS DUVEFELT, MD
Top 25 Doctor Blogs Award
Read my VERY FIRST blog post:
Recent posts
- Quick and Easy: How to Save Primary Care
- All These Gut Feelings: A 10-Year Old With Belly Pain
- Don’t Eat More of Anything (Until You Decide What to Eat Less Of)
- Why Can You Have Angina With Normal Coronary Arteries? For the Same Reason You Can Have Heart Failure With Preserved Ejection Fraction
- Another Gut Feeling: A Case of Visceral Hyperalgesia?
- Big Leg, Little Leg: The Lymphedema That Came and Went (Comments invited)
- Health Care Through the Back Door: The Dangers of Nurse Visits
- Since When? Looking for Change: The Heart of the Art of Diagnosis
- A Very Near Miss: The Worst Bout of Sciatica Ever
- Notes From My Sick Bed: Cold War, Viruses and History Repeating Itself
- How to Talk to Clinicians: Forget Workflows, Just Tell Us How Things Work
- Hijacked for Public Health Purposes: Previsit Planning and Morning Huddles
- A Stubborn Rash: When Doctors Don’t Communicate
- A Country Doctor Practices Bibliotherapy: Books by Prescription
- Always Looking for Zebras
- The App That Helps Me Be a More Patient Centered Physician
- The Misunderstood Medicinal Use of Yogurt
- I Heard About Chilblains in British Television Shows, Not in Medical School
- Care Reminders? No Time to Think on the Clinic Assembly Line
- A Year of Extremes: From Medieval Masks to mRNA Vaccines; From Science Denying Flat Earthers to the Prospect of Civil War
A Country Doctor Writes: 
Despite my instruction for morning lasix, Lilly took hers at bedtime! House calls teach you a lot. Mid morning on a Saturday, Lilly was dressed fully; one might say “encased” in clothes. She had a bedside commode and patiently explained to me that the diuresis from the lasix was much more easily handled at night in her loose nightgown; over to the bedside commode, and easily back to sleep.
I also learned that she milked the cow before she fixed Sam’s breakfast. I suggested that she fix breakfast first. She later reported that her arthritic hands hurt much less with the milking.