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About Me

Boldly doing parking lot drive-thru COVID-19 screenings

In late 2016, I started sending bulk messages to all of my patients, mainly as a way to offer preventative advice on what to do to avoid getting a cold/flu that season and also what to do in case they did, just realizing that it's always useful information and I spend a large amount of my time every November-April telling people individually about the same advice.

It was received really well and so I kept on doing them every month covering a broad range of topics that I felt people regularly asked about, just feeling like while there is a lot of good information out there, I think I have my own tone that might speak to people more than something generic from the Mayo Clinic website.  Also, the more you search for things on the internet about your health, the more likely it is to tell you that you have cancer so I was trying to circumvent that often undue anxiety.

So I've slowly been coalescing this blog and now that I've gone through to try to arrange all the topics, it seems like I really do have the oft-touted interest of preventative medicine I've liked to think I had all this time.

I spent a good number of years in Northern California so the topics may skew that way, but I'm a native Texan and repatriated in 2020 to Austin where I am an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School and clinician for UT Health Austin.

I'm a board-certified Internal Medicine doctor and outside of medicine enjoy spending time with my family, woodworking, volleyball, cycling and making terrible dad-jokes.

If you want to see more, my current employer made this video about me and my practice.  Ignore all the views - I think it was mostly just my mom watching it over and over.

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Kidney Stones

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NSAIDs

Advil and Motrin are ibuprofen, then you have Aleve (naproxen).  Those are the over-the-counter ones.  Prescriptions are Mobic (meloxicam), nabumetone, indomethacin, Toradol (ketorolac), diclofenac, Lodine, and the list goes on.  All of these medications are in a class called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). I'm giving you this list because there is mounting evidence that these medications a) don't work as well as we'd thought and b) have some very serious long term side effects we're finding out more about. NSAID's act by reducing the amount of prostaglandins you make in order to reduce inflammation.  However, prostaglandins have a ton of other effects and are involved in the maintenance of just about AIDs and also stronger if they are taken every day and/or around-the-clock.  every other organ system that you have.  The effect is stronger with higher doses of NS NSAID's work best and are best indicated for times when something is r...
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Pain

Sorry to be a pain I would say about 90% of the comments I hear from people about their pain threshold is that they think they have a high pain tolerance.  Which is statistically impossible unless I just attract people who have a high pain tolerance. We traditionally ask people to rate their pain on a 1-10/10 scale and while we hear a lot of 9's and 10's, I would say that, having been present for a number of them, a 10/10 would be giving birth to a first child.  For those who haven't experienced that, my old psychiatry resident described it as "so if I lit you on fire and ran you over with my truck, you would not be in any more pain than you are now" (he was also a former Marine sniper which might explain that). But this is pretty pervasive throughout the medical system and got me wondering as to how people's understanding of what their pain threshold was matched up to what it really was.  Fortunately, there were researchers who had a yen to poke peopl...
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