Test your clinical skills in this week’s 5-question quiz.

Test your clinical skills in this week’s 5-question quiz.

Test your clinical skills in this week’s 5-question quiz.

During pelvic examinations, tissue from the vaginal walls often obstructs the view of the cervix by entering laterally from either side of the open speculum.

Women often forget to perform a monthly breast self-examination.

For 3 days, a 23-yearold woman had been bothered by pruritic vaginal and vulvar lesions. A cheesy white vaginal discharge was associated with the itching. She denied being sexually active.

A boy was born to a gravida 2, para 1, 26-year-old woman at 37 weeks’ gestation. The pregnancy had been complicated by gestational diabetes. The infant was delivered vaginally; Apgar scores were 6 at 1 minute and 9 at 5 minutes.

Levofloxacin, 500 mg/d, had been prescribed for a 74-year-old woman who had a urinary tract infection. The patient had type 2 diabetes and hypertension. She was allergic to sulfa drugs. Two hours after taking the first oral dose of the antibiotic, painful blisters developed on the lower lip and soft palate.

A 75-year-old Hispanic woman presented with a slowly growing, asymptomatic facial lesion of about 3 years’ duration.

A 33-year-old man with AIDS presented to the emergency department with fever, dyspnea, cough, and pleuritic chest pain of 3 days’ duration. He had had a Pneumocystis carinii infection 3 years before recently emigrating from the Dominican Republic to the United States.

A 65-year-old woman with metastatic adenocarcinoma of the colon was undergoing chemotherapy following a colectomy and a hepatic wedge resection. The physical examination and laboratory data were unremarkable.

Numerous plaques, some with yellow crusting and central scarring, had erupted primarily on the face and neck of a 46-year-old man. A single lesion had developed on his left elbow as well. The lesions were initially diagnosed as impetigo, but they failed to resolve after 2 courses of oral cephalexin.

For 3 weeks, a 14-year-old boy had been aware of an enlarging lesion on the back of his hand. He recalled no trauma to the affected area. Further questioning by Dr D. Keith Cobb of Savannah, Ga, revealed that a 4-mm verruca, or wart, had been removed from the same site 6 months earlier with cryosurgery by a different physician.

At a recent retreat I led for doctors on the brink of total burnout, all hands went up when I asked if anyone had lost a colleague to suicide. All but one hand was raised to confirm having considered their own suicide. Many in the room had signed up for this weekend hoping to learn how to avoid becoming the colleague behind someone else's raised hand.

To suggest today that condoms are “obsolete” sounds heretical and like a topic ripe for heated debate. Here, HIV/AIDS blogger Dr. Rodger MacArthur lays out the science for your review.

I’ve been in practice for 20 years and have never lost a patient to suicide. But I have lost colleagues, friends, and lovers – ALL male physicians—to suicide. I have a long list of answers to the question, “Why?” Maybe the most fundamental answer is that doctors are human..