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The reason for developing this
course was to deal with the dilemma that many
primary care and emergency medicine physicians deal with on a daily
basis. That is the difficulty trying to be a physician and have
a life. It’s very hard to read all the journals that you need
to read, it is very difficult to keep up with all the medications
and pharmacologic treatments you need to know about when there are
new medications and new treatments coming out on a daily basis.
With this difficulty, if you were to truly try to stay current you
would have to probably read journals, articles, watch videos or
whatever you can 2-3 hours per day every single day of the year
to stay appropriately current in your particular area of expertise
so that the urgent care medicine, family care medicine, or family
care medicine. By attending this course you will receive a large
number of clinical pearls that will essentially condense hours and
hours of individual study into a course of 16 hours in length that
will provide you with enough clinical pearls to adequately equip
you to treat your patients knowing that you have the most current
clinical information in your arsenal as a physician.
As a mature physician you can come to this conference without any
fear. There may have been other conferences you’ve attended
where you feel afraid to ask a question because you have many other
younger and more current physicians present that who are asking
questions that seem more appropriate. At this conference you don’t
have to be afraid, you can approach our physicians 1-on-1 in the
faculty lounge area after each of their lectures or immediately
after a lecture or any time you see a speaker. Even at breakfast
or at lunch anytime they are approachable and here with a mindset
of wanting to educate you because they might be your patient.
Each sub specialists have been told that at some point in their
own lives they will experience a heart attack, chest pain or perhaps
paralysis or stroke. They as sub specialists are training you as
the mature primary care physicians on the things they want you to
know if they should become one of your patients. With that unique
perspective and approach given to each of the speakers, the speakers
want to tell you, they want to teach you, they want to hear your
questions and there is no such thing as a dumb question. They know
that there is a good chance that if they are visiting Wichita, Kansas
or Lone Pine, CA. and they begin having chest pain and you are the
doctor on duty they want to know that they taught you everything
you needed to know.
This conference attempts
to deal with the difficulty in the areas of
clinical interest that are most important to us as physicians. Those
areas are the areas that if a mistake or error occurs the patient
could potentially die. That is one of our greatest fears that physicians
have and as a result of that this course was born. After attending
this course an individual will walk away with an update in several
of the major areas of medicine that we as primary care physicians
have to deal with regularly. You will walk away with cardiology
secrets, how to:
- Take care of a patient with an abnormal EKG
- How to take care of a patient with a heart attack congestive heart
failure
- How to approach a patient with high blood pressure and appropriately
take care of them.
You’ll also learn these types of things in the following specialties;
Polminology, Neurology, Radiology
and Orthopedics here will also be special lectures
from a lawyer who have unique knowledge of courtroom in both protecting
and suing physicians. This unique knowledge is almost priceless
in that without this knowledge you will be lost and very high risk
for getting sued.
In summary, you will walk away from this course with a multi-disciplinary
education on the most current and clinically important details and
facts in diagnosis and treatments that you need to know as a primary
care physician practicing in 2009 so that you will not cause harm
to your patient.
You will walk away with specific drug names that are medications
that can help or hurt if not used appropriately. You will walk away
with specific dosages. You will have unique knowledge on how to
read an EKG. You will have learned how to perform a clinical assessment
of an individual with an extremity injury orthopedics. When dealing
with a patient who presents to you numbness or paralysis or some
kind of a neurological complaint, you will walk away from this course
knowing exactly how to examine this patient and how to look for
specific findings in the physical exam that will guide you towards
a particular diagnosis. You will learn how to treat a patient with
a neurological diagnosis whether that is paralysis, seizures or
Parkinson’s disease. There have been many changes in the management
of patients with Parkinson’s disease or diseases of the elderly
such as dementia.
The baby boomer generation is retiring in the next two years. For
the next twenty years the number of individuals above the age of
65 in the U.S. will outnumber the number of individuals of any other
age. For the next 20 years our country will have a very large number
of people who are living longer with a better quality of life who
are wanting the best medical care.
This conference is best suited
for a physician who has been in practice for
at least 5 years. Someone who has most recently graduated from a
residency program will feel that they are very current with their
clinical knowledge and backgrounds and other lectures as a result
of being in a residency program. However, approximately 5 years
after leaving residency is when a physician realizes that he/she
has not been able to keep up with 3 hours of reading of journals
or medical articles. That is when the fear grips you and the fear
that you might not have the most current information. Now, as a
physician you will have the general fund of knowledge, the basics
of how to take care of a broken bone and so forth. This course is
for a physician who realizes the fear, who wants to stay current
and who wants to be taught by specialists and by a fellow physician
in his/her specialty. For example; a family practice physician would
probably want to know the best way to take care of a heart attack
from a Cardiologist rather than a fellow family physician. Now there
are other circumstances where family related material is best taught
by a family physician. This conference is best suited for an individual
who wants high quality CME taught by the individuals who practice
medicine at the highest level in their particular area of expertise
rather it is Cardiology, Polminolgy,
Neurology, Orthopedics, Radiology, legal related items or Optimology
or any sub specialties, If you attend our course on a yearly basis
you will be kept current in all of the areas you need to be current
in the rest of your career.
The way in which a person who has graduated from residency training
in less than 5 years can benefit from this course is because the
day that you graduate from your residency program is most likely
the day you want to be able to live a normal life. You don’t
want to study every night, you want to be able to relax, you want
to watch movies, hang out with friends and family or all the things
you were not able to do because you were in your residency program.
Once you are able to start doing those things you will not be spending
the time needed to stay current. Realistically this conference is
for any physician out
of residency because the moment that you leave residency you are
not current on medication, treatments or diagnosis. Ideally the
moment after you leave residency this program will benefit
you greatly.
If you have been in practice for 20-25 years this practice is extremely
well suited for you. The reason is the material is current, prudent
and given to us by speakers who vary by the length in their medical
years. Some have been in practice for 10 years, 20 years, or even
5 years. What you will get is a mature seasoned physician is the
current opinions from your colleges and the specialists who are
very friendly and easy to approach. In prior conferences some of
the mature physicians who have attended initially felt apprehensive
at approaching a Cardiologist to ask them a question on how to handle
a myocardial infarction because when they were in medical school
25 years ago it was handled in a given way. Now with all of the
changes in the medications, diagnosis tools even the mature physician
might feel apprehensive or afraid that he they might ask a dumb
question. The good thing to know is that our
speakers are human, approachable and friendly.
Based on past conferences that we have already had mature physicians
love talking to our physicians because we have no bias we are here
to teach as a sub specialist each sub specialist has been given
this information as they prepare their lecture.
The biggest mistake that physician 5 years out of practice make
is to assume that when they see a patient with a given problem is
to assume that you know what you’re doing, assume that you
are current on all of your clinical knowledge and in reality you
are not. That is when you make a mistake you don’t give the
right medication, you give the wrong dosage, you’re not up
to date on a drug interaction and you prescribe a medication that
is already a list of other medications that can inevitably lead
to their death. One of the top ten causes of death in the U.S. is
physician or patient miss administration of pharmaceutical drugs.
Another one of the big mistakes that you’re going to make
5 years out is you haven’t kept current on your studies, you
haven’t kept current on your physical exam diagnosis and you
will miss the diagnosis of a patient who is coming to you with a
potentially life threatening problem and that patient will end up
with that problem presenting more than likely the patient will seek
a different physician and your name will come up and you will likely
get sued. Because you did not properly identify the problem when
the patient came to you first and you think that you know what you
are doing and that you think that you are current and in reality
you are not. Your biggest problem 5 years out of practice is thinking
that you know how to diagnosis and treat problems and you have not
kept up with your reading.
The biggest mistake the physician that is 20-25 years out of residency
will make is that they will encounter a patient with a particular
complaint such as chest pain. They will evaluate the patient based
on the knowledge they have learned from residency and medical school
and they will treat the patient based on that. The patient will
respond according to that treatment. Now, 20-25 years ago the treatment
of chest pain still involved the use of morphine. However 20-25
years ago there were no antithrombotic agents that would chew up
or digest clots. So physician 20-25 years out would see the patient,
treat the patient, and the patient will most likely improve somewhat.
However because that physician is not up to date on the current
treatments the patient will not be as good in the end as he/she
could have been with current state of the art therapy.
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