A Country Doctor Writes:

Left to my own devices, I would be selective about when and how much of a physical exam I do: either not at all or very detailed for just those things that can help me make the diagnosis. I have no patience for boilerplate normal exams. Any doctor who uses the term PERRLA (pupils equal, round, reactive to light and accommodation) is probably faking it. First, most of the time this isn’t actually tested completely and, second, even if it’s done correctly, it has no relevance in the majority of chart notes I have found it in. I have actually seen it in office note templates for urinary tract infections!

It is well known that the history makes the diagnosis in the vast majority of cases. But that task – or art, actually – is sometimes relegated to support staff or forced into unnatural click boxes. Because reimbursement until very recently was tied to how many items were asked about and examined, there was a loss of the story, or narrative, of the patient’s illness. And you could get more brownie points by including things that were extremely peripheral to the clinical problem at hand.

EMRs make it easy to produce long office notes with lots of reimbursement and quality scoring points of uncertain clinical value and accuracy.

Specifically, the physical exam has in many instances become a corrupted, fraudulent, one-click travesty of the art and professionalism we swore an oath to hold high when we graduated from medical school.

The pandemic and the rush toward telemedicine made it clear to most people that medical diagnosis, advice and treatment is entirely possible without physical contact. It was just a matter of getting paid for it, or the healthcare industry would have come to a stop, or at least a crawl.

Now that we have admitted that listening, talking and a certain amount of looking or observing can be done without being in the same room, it is time for us to be honest about the value of the physical exam:

It is a ritual.

It is often irrelevant.

It is often done poorly.

It was exploited for reimbursement when cognitive work was undervalued.

Our medical education in universities and tertiary medical centers taught us how to handle complex and baffling cases that had eluded diagnosis in the primary care setting: Start from scratch, assume nothing. This is a method we need to use in select clinical situations.

But in everyday practice that is inefficient and unnecessary. Most of what we see is simple stuff and part of our job is to triage, to know when something seemingly ordinary is or has the potential to be more serious.

We need to know how to do a really good and relevant physical exam when the situation requires it. But we also need to know when that would add nothing and only waste our time and effort.

(“Routine physical exams“ for asymptomatic people are a separate topic. They have almost no proven value according to Choosing Wisely. Even clinical breast exams are not supported by evidence.)

Let’s embrace the new honesty about the value of our work:

Our work cannot always be measured by its comprehensiveness or by the time it takes. The sages people have sought out throughout human history all tended to be brief and to the point, which is part of why they have always been valued. They see the central issue more clearly. So should we as physicians. We need to know where to spend our effort.

The practice of medicine is cognitive work. The more skilled you are, the less you may need to fumble around to make a diagnosis. The better you explain and motivate, the less time you might need to initiate a treatment plan for each patient.

Televisits tended to take less time than in-person visits. Consider the implications of that in this era of purported physician shortages. It is part of the basic question: Where is our training and experience best used, performing ritualistic and pseudo-comprehensive exams or zeroing in where attention is needed?

I am not advocating telemedicine over in-person visits. Telemedicine can be convenient and practical, especially when you live hundreds of miles from specialists. But I am advocating a different view of the clinic visit in general:

Stop faking comprehensiveness. Have the courage and integrity to do only what the clinical situation requires. Don’t fill your visit or office notes with phony fluff. If you then have time left over, use it to relate to your patient as a human being, instead of a virtual/human checklist.

I just posted this on A Country Doctor Talks. There are more patient education videos in the pipeline, but I would love to hear suggestions for other topics.

The blood thinner we have used for so many years is gradually being replaced by the novel anticoagulants, which don’t require laboratory monitoring and have fewer interactions. But for some indications, warfarin is still preferred and for many patients, it is still by far the more affordable anticoagulant.

Dosing warfarin has always been an art and it seems to be less often mastered than it used to be. The three challenges are drug interactions, food interactions and dosing schedules.

DRUG INTERACTIONS

Just the other day, I was covering for a colleague and got an urgent message that her patient had a supratherapeutic INR – too much thinning of his blood. I asked the medical assistant to find out if the patient was taking any new medications, like ciprofloxacin, that might interact with the warfarin. I just threw that drug name out because it is such a common and overlooked interaction. Sure enough, somebody else had prescribed ciprofloxacin two days earlier for a urinary infection.

I played detective and tracked down the urine culture, which showed the coli bacteria were resistant to ciprofloxacin, but sensitive to nitrofurantoin (safe) and Bactrim (unsafe). I messaged the prescribing provider, who changed the patient’s antibiotic to nitrofurantoin, so I just ordered the warfarin held for two days.

Many providers seem to be unaware or less paranoid than I am about drugs that interact with warfarin. I once had a patient end up in the intensive care unit with critical internal bleeding because I prescribed levofloxacin with plans to check her INR every couple of days during her antibiotic course. That was clearly not cautious enough in her case.

I have seen great variability in how much other drugs affect the effect of warfarin, especially azithromycin, amoxicillin-clavulanate and also acetaminophen and prednisone, both of which in most people doesn’t seem to cause much trouble. But I worry about all of them, plus sulfamethoxazole, metronidazole, fluconazole, NSAIDs (obviously) and new starts of amiodarone, sertraline, carbamazepine and many others. Over the counter agents to worry about include fish oil, ginkgo biloba and St Johns Wort.

This is not a complete listing, and since most of us have EMRs that warn us of interactions you would think close calls like this would never happen. The problem here is the multitude of basic warnings providers know in their sleep, so that the less famous issues drown among the unnecessary alerts (see my posts about Alarm Fatigue).

I end up using epocrates’ interaction checker on my iPhone to double check sometimes, but, as I said, I’ve been burned so I know this stuff know.

FOOD INTERACTIONS

Warfarin interferes with the role of vitamin K in the coagulation process. Therefore, if you flood your system with foods rich in vitamin K, which is the pharmacological antidote to warfarin, you decrease the effectiveness of warfarin. A week before my ciprofloxacin case, one of my own patients suddenly had a low INR. “Ask him if he’s been eating fiddleheads”, I told Autumn. Sure enough, this Maine spring delicacy was the culprit. The season is short and he wasn’t going to have more, he said, so I didn’t change his dose schedule.

A lot of people are under the impression they cannot eat green vegetables while on warfarin. I tell them that’s like saying you can’t open your windows in the winter if you heat with wood. Imagine you know how many logs to put in the wood stove at certain outdoor temperatures. Then imagine you decide to open a window now and then. You would then have to adjust your fire whenever you opened the window, compensating for the heat loss. If you instead decided to leave a crack open all the time, you would quickly figure out your new firewood budget.

So I simply tell my patients, “eat all the greens you want, but be sure to keep the amount the same every day”.

DOSING WARFARIN: DON’T DRIVE LIKE YOU’RE MR. MAGOO AND PLEASE LEARN FROM YOUR MISTAKES

Mr. Magoo is like me without my glasses. If I were to drive in a snowstorm without my glasses, I would only see a couple of feet in front of me and I would be turning my steering wheel a lot more than necessary. I wouldn’t be able to tell if I was entering a small or a big curve, for instance. If I could see further ahead, I would make smaller corrections. Many providers will look at the current INR value and the previous one, and the current warfarin dose. Then they change the dose. Unless you have a flowsheet that tells you that the last time you made that change, bad things happened, you will make the same poor choice again. On paper, such flowsheets are easy to maintain, but – believe it or not – in many EMRs it is just too darn cumbersome to do.

I have a three ring binder with all my warfarin patients’ flowsheets. It helps me avoid Mr. Magoo type errors and it also serves as a low tech way of making sure no warfarin patients fall off my radar screen. Autumn or I sometimes just flip through the binder to make sure our flock doesn’t wander off, so to speak.

An old fashioned method of managing an old fashioned medication…

One of the classic deceptions of the snack food industry is to pretend that a small package contains enough to feed two or more people. This small bag of Fritos has only 160 calories per serving, but it is supposed to feed 4 1/2 people. Only 160 is printed in bold, whereas you’d have to do the math yourself to figure out that your snack bag has 720 calories in it. And even beverages, say a bottle of chocolate milk, can be tricky. One serving can be an 8, 12 or 14 Oz bottle with 150-250 calories

Perhaps you could make the argument about meat and potatoes that there is such a thing as a “normal” or “average” serving. Even that is arguable, since that can vary according to a person’s activity level: Proverbial lumberjacks and teenage boys often eat larger portions than sedentary elderly individuals, for example.

But most snacks are, let’s be honest here, not really food and not really part of a healthy diet. So why should we pretend that there is agreement of how much we “should” or “might” eat of them?

Suggesting that most people can stop at a fraction of what’s in the bag is playing dirty. Wasn’t there a slogan that went “nobody can eat just one”?

(Disclosure: I, too, sometimes eat Fritos, and then usually more than one “serving”.)

Physicians are generally highly motivated to treat their patients well, both in terms of clinically well and in a nice manner. When they don’t do that, it isn’t usually because of personality disorders or character flaws, but because their jobs are robbing them of their enthusiasm and compassion.

Sometimes it is our own fault that we get burned out. I realized this ten years ago today (!) when I read Claire Burge’s post about burnout skills. We are, by nature and by training, fixers and problem solvers. Because healthcare these days is so dysfunctional, many of us feel like we should be heroes and do “the impossible” in spite of limited time, resources, support and so on. When we do that, we get external praise or praise ourselves, so we end up doing it again. That can be a vicious cycle of always fighting uphills battles, ultimately at our own expense.

But many times, we risk getting burned out even when we aren’t over-capitalizing our heroism. Sometimes the everyday, totally routine tasks put us at risk for burnout. A lot has been written about moral injury in healthcare as a cause for burnout. I agree that can be a dramatic contributing factor sometimes, but I firmly believe the most fundamental cause of burnout is that we, trained clinicians, diagnosticians and decision makers, are put in the position of public health nurses and data entry operators.

This is a terrible waste of a medical education and a sure way to job dissatisfaction and burnout.

It is frustrating for physicians to hear that everyone in their organization except them should work “at the top of their license”.

Think about it:

A patient is due for their ten year colonoscopy recall. The surgical clinic sends an electronic message asking the primary care physician to make a referral so the insurance will pay. It isn’t enough to respond or forward a “MAKE IT SO” command. No, the physician has to create a non-billable encounter, locate the correct diagnosis code for screening for malignant neoplasms of colon, Z12.11, click however many times it then takes to indicate the provider or clinic and send the order off to the referral coordinator.

Or:

A patient comes in for a sore thumb and is behind on all kinds of screenings and chronic care. Instead of devoting the visit to making the correct diagnosis, bacterial paronychia versus herpetic whitlow, and then treating it correctly, the physician is now held personally responsible for catching the patient up on things that could have been figured out and handled by an unlicensed staffer under the supervision of a public health type nurse working with practice wide protocols.

If there were “efficiency experts” analyzing what we do in healthcare, would they really recommend that the people with the highest degree of education do the most basic functions of data entry and checking off health screening protocols?

I find the priorities of modern primary care bewildering. I personally feel less burned out when I double book sick patients or stay late to take care of a complex new patient than when I am put in a position of bookkeeper. If I wanted to be an accountant or a public health nurse, I would have gone to school for that.

The Counterintuitive Concept of Burnout Skills