A Country Doctor Writes:

“No better” was the message I got last week about a sore toe, a stubborn cough and a case of C. Difficile diarrhea. All three messages were false alarms, misleading missives, inadequate information or whatever you want to call it.

After a few more questions, all three patients turned out to actually be doing much better than the messages suggested.

The octogenarian with the sore toe, which looked like gout to me, told me the exquisite pain she had experienced from the lightest touch was gone, the throbbing had subsided, and now there was just a strange itching deep inside her toe. The swelling was almost gone, and she didn’t even flinch when I squeezed her toe. The two days of prednisone I had prescribed really seemed to have helped her. And, her uric acid level had come back elevated.

The man with a cough back in April had actually almost stopped coughing after a ten day course of antibiotics for his cough, sinus congestion and postnatal drip. But his symptoms had gradually started to come back. He hadn’t refilled his prescription as I had told him he could, but decided to give it more time. Now he was almost back at square one. I told him to take another round of the antibiotic and expect to see him do well.

The poor woman with clostridium colitis had improved significantly, but wasn’t quite back to normal. Her probiotic order had stopped when her metronidazole stopped and she turned out to have a fondness for tall glasses of cold milk. I had her restart her lactobacillus and give up the milk, and within two days her stools were formed.

In all three cases, one or two simple followup questions provided information that the prescribed treatments had actually worked fairly well. But in all three scenarios, either the patient or the person who took the message seemed to have an all-or-nothing mindset, almost like a “true or false” quiz, or “complains of/denies” click boxes in our electronic medical record.

This is a problem in healthcare today: Information is expected to be “discrete”, “structured”, or straightforward. But people and diseases are usually more nuanced than that. And without the nuances provided by a real patient narrative, we risk making deleterious treatment decisions.

Medical practice is not usually so algorithmic that simple yes or no answers can guide our treatment decisions. One person’s yes is another person’s no, depending on their expectations and a host of psychological factors.

Our job is to listen to the narrative and, only then, decide whether to follow the “yes” or the “no” arm of whatever algorithm we are trying to apply.

In this era of EMR click boxes and team based care, there is a real danger of seeking simple answers without listening to patients long enough to understand what they are trying to tell us.

We learned this in medical school and residency. EMR people and office staff didn’t. We need to pause and think like doctors before we give knee-jerk responses to seemingly simple messages.

Once upon a time there were jokes circulating about putting Prozac (fluoxetine) in the drinking water.

The idea was that the modern antidepressants were indicated for most people living in today’s society, and that these drugs were completely safe to use.

Now, these same drugs have so many warnings that they have become increasingly difficult to use in treating the common maladies of depression and anxiety.

The earliest scuttlebutt about Prozac causing suicidal thinking never did go away completely. We were assured that the suicide rate itself did not go up, only thinking about it. Some of that was explained by powerful antidepressants potentially unmasking bipolar illness and causing manic episodes. But a few years later, Paxil (paroxetine) was reported to cause suicidality in adolescents.

Just in the past few months, I was reminded several times about the intricacies of prescribing SSRIs.

A middle aged man on the blood thinner warfarin suddenly developed nosebleeds when his INR shot above the therapeutic range. His psychiatrist had doubled his Prozac two weeks earlier.

An anxious and depressed elderly woman wanted to try an antidepressant, and I gave her a low dose of Lexapro (escitalopram). She told me the following week that she felt tired and listless. I ordered some routine blood taste and her sodium level came back precipitously low. We stopped her Lexapro and she felt better again within a week.

A tall, thin elderly man with Parkinson’s disease and depression wanted to try something for his mood. I searched the literature and prescribed the SSRI with the most data on use in his condition. The following week he felt lightheaded. His blood pressure and pulse were both lower than his baseline, and I ended up cutting his beta blocker in half twice before his vital signs normalized; I had never heard or seen this interaction before.

A middle aged woman with a history of pulmonary emboli had been difficult to regulate on warfarin, and during a recent hospitalization, the doctors had changed her over to the novel anticoagulant Eliquis (apixaban), which doesn’t require any monitoring. When it was time to refill her Zoloft (sertraline), my computer flagged me with a bold, red warning that apixaban and sertraline are a dangerous combination resulting in increased risk for bleeding.

The list of warnings for this class of drug goes on, including effects on pregnancy, heart arrhythmias, seizures, glaucoma, liver disease and diabetes.

Given that their effectiveness is reported to be only marginally better than placebo, I have become increasingly more cautious about prescribing them.

Just this year, though, in Molecular Psychiatry, a new analysis of old data suggests that previous studies had used an ineffective rating system for depression, and that SSRIs are more powerful than we thought.

I remain skeptical. Once bitten, twice shy.

“I should be home well before nine o’clock”, I said to my wife on the phone as I steered my eight cylinder SUV quietly down the highway at 75 mph (121 km/h) with more than 100 miles left to go.

“More like eight fifty-five”, I added.

“That’s well before nine?” She sounded both weary and incredulous. I knew what she meant. I am not as obsessive about time as I used to be, but even outside the clinic, I have an awareness of time that is possibly not entirely normal or healthy.

As a physician in America today, I work within a schedule of fifteen minute blocks. Some visits, like physicals or hospital follow-ups are scheduled for thirty minutes, but the bulk of what I do has to average out to fit a fifteen minute slot, or sometimes, when we double-book, half of that.

It takes constant awareness of time to function in that manner, and I work very consciously not to relay that awareness too plainly to my patients.

Whenever I work with new scheduling staff, I have to help them learn how long things take. They don’t usually know much about medicine, but it is essential to have a sense of which things take a lot of time and which don’t.

For example, a person with acute chest pain and shortness of breath, although this may sound serious, only takes a few minutes, because it involves a triage decision – if it’s bad enough we ship them out to the hospital. If it’s not, we order a basic set of tests with relatively few possible outcomes.

On the other hand, an older person with fatigue, depression, nausea, weakness, weight loss or any kind of gynecological or bowel related problem takes a lot more time. Just getting an older person undressed and on the exam table can take half of a fifteen minute slot, let alone taking a good history from someone whose memory, conversation style or medical savvy isn’t in tune with the pace of today’s society.

In the past I remember making lists. An earache takes five minutes, severe headaches up to fifteen, and so on.

I also often say, “if you can’t figure out what they need or if you can’t get off the phone with them, I probably can’t solve their problem in a double booked, seven and a half minute slot.”

Compared to ten or fifteen years ago, I am less emotionally affected by my gains or losses in my daily race against the clock. I tend to make more automatic, subconscious corrections in my pace, depending on how my day is going. And, more importantly, I seldom get frustrated about time.

Managing time is a little like driving, more automatic after more years of practice.

I remember how I completely failed to notice two pedestrians trying to cross the street in one of my early driving lessons. I was stopped at a red light on a hill and getting ready to turn left. I was completely focused on my left foot on the clutch, the ball of my right foot on the brake pedal and my heel on the accelerator, hoping the baby blue Volvo wouldn’t stall on me.

Now, even though I don’t drive a standard very often, I can still do those kind of maneuvers without engaging my conscious mind.

In the clinic, even though I am always aware of where I am, time-wise, I almost always carefully control how I express that awareness. My years of experience often help me get to the heart of things quicker than I did in my youth, and my years of relationship building with my patients give me the credibility to sometimes declare priorities when there is more going on than I can reasonably address in one visit.

At the same time, some of the things I have seen over the years have helped me recognize those times when I have to stop everything and do what needs to be done, no matter how long it takes.

Handling time, like so many other things we do in medicine, is a necessary part of our work, but it isn’t the essence of our work. Time can be a distraction, just like our technology can be too visible.

People who don’t treat patients themselves don’t usually understand the nature of our work. Instead, they focus their attention on things they know: Is the doctor running on time, is the documentation complete, are the billing codes correct, or does the doctor have “huddle” with the scheduler and medical assistant every morning?

Focusing too consciously on any one of such housekeeping issues detracts from the real work that we do, at least when we are new in our careers. For a brand new driver, how you drive is at first more important than where you are going, because of all the components that necessarily go into driving a car safely. For a new healthcare provider, the form of our work tends to dictate the function, especially in today’s hyper-regulated corporate environment.

When we deal with patients, we need to keep the external considerations as invisible as possible. We need to inspire the confidence that we are really paying attention and we need to create an atmosphere that is conducive to healing.

When I talked to my wife from the car the other night, I should have dropped my instinctive thoughts of that five minute margin, just like I didn’t give her a blow by blow account of which way I was turning the steering wheel, whether I was using cruise control or not, or whether I had switched on my high beams.

I should have just said, “I’ll see you at nine”.

A woman in her mid thirties with a terrible limp and a past surgical history in the dozens became my patient two years ago. Her prosthetic left leg served her well, but her right leg was moving awkwardly because of advanced hip arthritis and a formerly shattered ankle.

She was on long acting morphine and short acting oxycodone. Her Social Security disability insurance didn’t cover the long acting form of oxycodone.

She told me several times how much she hated being on narcotics, but they kept her functioning. She was able to do her own housework and she was taking classes in medical coding and billing.

Her pill counts were always correct and her urine drug screens always showed morphine and oxycodone – never anything else.

A year ago, an anonymous caller told Autumn that my patient was injecting her morphine. I saw a couple of scratches on her arms, and she told me she had this nervous habit of picking at her skin. I said that habit could keep her from receiving future prescriptions for pain medications, and I never again saw any marks on her arms or legs.

Last summer, we got an emergency room report from Massachusetts that documented how my patient had presented with symptoms of opiate withdrawal. The story she had told there was that she had lost all her pain medication when her car was broken into at a highway rest area several days earlier. She was dehydrated and needed intravenous fluids.

When I saw her back, she was still shaky, and she asked me not to represcribe her long acting morphine. She said, tearfully, that she was determined to get off her narcotics. Just some oxycodone to take the edge off her pain, but she didn’t want to have these drugs in her system all the time, she told me.

Her next drug screen only showed oxycodone and its metabolite, oxymorphone, just as expected.

A few months later, she ended up missing her followup appointment because her mother fell ill and needed emergency surgery. “I stretched my oxycodones”, she said, “and I did all right”.

“Let me do another drug screen, to prove that you didn’t take anything else”, I said.

She tensed up, but didn’t say anything, except “will the results go up on the new patient portal?”

“As soon as I’ve signed off on them, yes.”

A few days later, the opiate confirmation test came in. Her oxycodone level was medium high, but there was no oxymorphone, suggesting only recent oxycodone intake, but not proving continuous use. That was reasonable as she had been taking her prescription less regularly. But, confusing at first, her morphine level was higher than the assay could measure. There was also a high level of codeine.

I had in front of me a test result that suggested probable heroin use.

I had to check my facts, but needed some extra time to do my research. Meanwhile, she called to inquire about her results. Autumn told her that they probably hadn’t come in yet, if they weren’t on the portal.

Heroin, also called diacetylmorphine, is rapidly metabolized to 6-monoacetylmorphine (6-MAM), which is six times more potent. Within a few hours, 6-MAM is transformed to morphine and no longer detectable in urine or other body fluids. Street heroin often has some acetylcodeine in it, which is metabolized into codeine.

I checked with the reference lab. They could run a test for 6-MAM, but because it is present only for a few hours, it might still be negative even if my patient was using heroin. The turnaround time for the analysis could be up to a week.

I picked up the phone.

“I’ve got your opiate confirmation test”, I started.

She was silent.

“It shows your oxycodone, but also more morphine than I’ve ever seen, and some codeine.”

She said nothing.

“That is the pattern we see with heroin use. And, in any case, you wouldn’t be expected to have that much morphine in your system when you are no longer prescribed morphine, and I never prescribed codeine for you. I have a confirmation test pending for 6-MAM, which is a breakdown product that we see in the body before heroin becomes morphine. But this disappears quickly from the system, so we don’t always see it in heroin users”, I explained, based on my recent homework.

She still said nothing, except “can you put the result up on the portal so I can look at it?”

That was it. She hung up. I never heard from her again.

A few days later, her 6-MAM report came back. It was positive. I signed off on it, and it went up on the portal.

Dustin Ouellete grew up a bit the other day.

I had known Dustin as an infant, and his mother before that. Several years ago, the Ouellete family moved away to the big city, but last summer they came back.

Dustin came in a few times with his father, and his main concern was migraines. Dustin’s father, a quiet man who seldom smiles, was concerned that the headaches were keeping his son from excelling in sports, and Dustin seemed overwhelmed with the idea of taking daily medication.

It seemed clear that physical exertion beyond a certain intensity was a trigger for Dustin’s s migraines, and at first, he thought he might be able to treat them as they came along and just be careful about learning his limits. Ibuprofen, taken early during a migraine, seemed to work three quarters of the time. The sumatriptan I had prescribed worked once and seemed ineffective another time, his father reported on the phone a few weeks after Dustin’s first visit.

I saw them in followup, and he agreed to try topiramate. During the titration period, he still had a few migraines, so I got a phone call that they were stopping it.

A short while ago. Dustin came in with his mother, an exuberant woman who used to have migraines as a teenager.

Dustin had tried out for another sport and had started to have migraines again. He had restarted the topiramate, but at 50 mg twice a day it wasn’t holding him. He was considering dropping that sport and choosing something less strenuous. His mother said “it’s up to you, Dustin”. He looked glum and overwhelmed.

I thought for a minute, then leaned back and started:

“Well, Dustin, you have a choice here. You can spend the rest of your life tiptoeing around the triggers you have for these migraines and turn away from this sport or that, or you can invest some more time and effort in finding the right dose of the medication we have started, or another one, and figure out once and for all what it’s going to take to beat this problem so you can do anything you want, maybe not this season but for the future.”

I could see his mind working.

I continued, “it’s like my right shoulder. I have dislocated it many times, but now I know exactly what I have to avoid in order for that not to happen – I can’t put my jacket on while sitting down, I can’t reach for something in the back seat while I’m driving, and so on. I decided not to have surgery, so I have to live by my limitations. That was the right decision for me, but someone with a different job might have made the opposite decision.”

Dustin sat motionless for what felt like two full minutes. Suddenly his posture changed, from a semi-slouch to bolt upright, and his eyes came alive.

“I think I’ll drop out off track this year, work my way up on the topiramate dose, see how the beginning of the summer goes just doing some informal stuff, and then be ready for soccer season.”

“You claimed it!” I made a “yes” gesture with my hand. “You stopped being a victim, you are taking charge, and not letting your migraines run your life”, I said.

Dustin almost squirmed with enthusiasm in his seat, and his mother beamed in her corner of the room.

I continued, “you can up it by 25 mg every week, I’ll send a new prescription for some 50’s, take sumatriptan if you get a migraine, and you call me when you get to 100 mg twice a day, oaky?”

“You got it!”

Dustin stood up, and his mother followed. He was taking charge.