A Country Doctor Writes:

His heartburn was way out of control, even on maximum doses of pantoprazole and ranitidine. It burned all the way up behind his breastbone and he could feel the choking quality of the sticky acidity deep in his throat. He hurt and coughed after eating, so hard that he would vomit and lose his breath. What he vomited was mostly mucous. “It’s like my esophagus is bubbling over”, he described it.

If he missed a dose of either medication, his symptoms worsened within an hour. “So the medications must be doing something, but nowhere near enough”, he told me.

A couple of years ago he had been turned down for an upper endoscopy because he also happened to have severe angina, and the gastroenterologist was concerned about his anesthesia risk.

“So I keep suffering”, he sighed.

He had the head of his bed elevated, and he didn’t eat spicy food or drink alcohol, but he did smoke. And he admitted to a “smokers cough”, every morning with some light colored phlegm.

I listened. Something didn’t fit. He talked too much about mucous.

“Would you be willing to try something?” I asked.

“Anything”, he answered.

I listened to his lungs and recorded his Peak Expiratory Flow, 300, moderately below normal.

“You have COPD”, I explained.

He raised his eyebrows.

“Chronic Bronchitis, one form of COPD, is defined as cough with phlegm more than two months out of the year. I’d like you to try an inhaler that reduces your phlegm production and improves your breathing.”

I left the room and went to get an inhaler from the sample closet. I logged it in the EMR and showed him how the device works and said, “use this once a day and see me back in two weeks. It will help your ’smokers cough’, but it may also do something for your heartburn. If not, we’ll really have to put our thinking caps on”.

Exactly two weeks later, after I knocked on the exam room door and entered, he rose from his chair with a big grin and stretched out his right hand.

“With that inhaler just once a day, my heartburn is completely gone.”

I checked his Peak Flow, 420.

“And your breathing is better, too”, I added.

“Yes, and my smokers cough.”

I sat down.

“All these years, all the doctors I’ve seen, and you just listened for a few minutes and…gave me an inhaler. Was it not GERD?”

I told him what I thought.

“You’ve got bad acid reflux, no question, but you also, obviously, have chronic bronchitis. So we’ve helped your breathing and dried up your bronchial secretions, which were very significant and very bothersome. Some of them probably went down your esophagus, even if you weren’t consciously swallowing them, and maybe caused some irritation.”

I took a deep breath and continued:

“But the inhaler I gave you is called an anticholinergic. It doesn’t just reduce secretions in your lungs. It is absorbed into the blood stream and can have anticholinergic effects elsewhere in the body. I once had a patient, an older man with an enlarged prostate, become unable to urinate and need his bladder catheterized because the inhaler affected his bladder’s ability to contract. We use anticholinergic pills to help the problems many women have with frequent urination. Medications with anticholinergic side effects, like amitriptyline, can also affect bowel contractions and cause constipation. But I’ve never seen that from an inhaler like the one I gave you.”

He seemed almost spellbound, and I continued:

“I really didn’t know if the inhaler would do much for your acid reflux, and I’ve never heard of it being used for that, but when I was young I had terrible heartburn from the hiatal hernia I didn’t even know I had back then. This was before the kinds of medicines you take were invented, before omeprazole, the Swedish forerunner to pantoprazole, and before ranitidine. The only medicine that existed for stomach acid was – an anticholinergic. I still remember, it was called “ULCOBAN” [probably for ’ulcer banned’?], and I also still remember how dry my mouth used to be when I took it. But it worked.

So, it was just a gut feeling, no pun intended, that there might be a double effect from the anticholinergic inhaler, less mucous in your lungs and less acid in your stomach. And we lucked out.”

I thought he’d never let go of my hand as he shook it on his way out.

.

I’ve been toying with this dilemma for a while: SOAP notes (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan) are too long; APSO just jumbles the order, but the core items are still too far apart, with too much fluff in between. We need something better – aSOAP!

Electronic medical record notes are simply way too cumbersome, no matter in what order the segments are displayed, to be of much use if we quickly want to check what happened in the last few office visits before entering the exam room.

It is time we do something different, and I believe the solution is under our noses every day, at least if we read the medical journals:

I can be aware of what’s going on in the medical literature without reading every article. How? Think about it…

A patient note, like a scientific article, should not present the information in reversed or scrambled order. It should follow logic. But, just like any long research paper worth considering, we should simply create an ABSTRACT and put it up top. Enter the aSOAP; abstract, Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan.

In many ways, EMR office notes are created so automatically and by more than one individual, that the author’s (clinician’s) logic can be elusive when you read the note. There are also click boxes that could be used to document the “story” but which many of us avoid because they don’t offer enough variety to distinguish one scenario from another. A free-form “abstract” can be a perfect complement to a more consistent use of this kind of structured data entry.

The abstract is not the same as putting the assessment and plan up top. It mixes all the elements of the progress note in concise form: Past history, new symptoms, Objective findings, immediate and next-step plans. It reveals how the clinician thinks.

I believe the slight amount of time it takes to Dragon or Siri (are those verbs yet?) an “abstract” is regained in multiples every time we later have to look back in our own or a colleague’s progress note.

Here are some imaginary examples:

“Former smoker with 3 week history of cough, recent weight loss. Azithromycin, inhaler, lab, x-ray when available and FU 2 weeks, CT prn at Cityside if creatinine still ok.”

“DM, HBP, migraine, psoriasis fu, all stable. Foot exam wnl. Offered Shingrix and colonoscopy, wants to wait. Refill all meds. FU 3 mo.”

How many more seconds would we need to spend on reading the rest of such notes? Probably zero.

Time saved. Move on. Here’s my marketing slogan: aSOAP makes ASAP!

(For those of you who weren’t there…this is what entire office notes used to look like. I’m proposing that the future lies in the past.)

Last year I put down ten things I intended to do better in my role as a doctor, and as I look back at that post, I think I made headway in most of those areas.

This year, I don’t really feel up to making a long, detailed list. I’m more thinking about “the big picture”.

There are two kinds of philosophies, two diametrically opposed ways of looking at the world, expansive and reductive.

We move back and forth along that spectrum. Many forces are at work to push us to one of the extremes: Touch as many aspects of a patient’s medical situation as possible. This is manifested in our mandated and self imposed checklists. We screen for depression, smoking, alcohol use, cancers and a host of preventive care gaps every time we see a patient.

The expansive approach has been viewed as desirable while “reductive” has become something negative, even described as “crude” by several dictionaries.

I think, and I will cultivate this in the coming year, that medicine has brought us too far in the expansive direction and that we aren’t seeing the forest for all the trees.

We aren’t seeing the patient behind the multitude of measurements; we aren’t seeing the connection between their various ailments; we aren’t seeing the connection between their emotions and their bodies.

I believe that whatever success I have had in filling my appointment schedule through four decades with loyal patients who travel great distances or wait longer than I’d like to see me isn’t from me covering a million things in each visit. I believe, and many tell me, that it is because I dig deep into their concern of the day, and because I zero in on who they really are.

In order to get to know somebody, do you step back for some kind of “birds eye view” and ask many wide ranging questions, or do you lean in, look them in the eyes, lower your own voice and invite them to speak freely?

Ours is a vocation founded in relationship. I aim to strengthen my patient relationships, and I aim to use my available technology and my team members to help with the laundry lists of today’s health care duties so that I can know my patients even better and be the glue that connects my patients to the clinics I work for.