A new patient (below), a 60-year-old woman, presented for ''spongiotic dermatitis'' diagnosed after a biopsy in March 2011.  At the time, she received cortisone cream and no follow-up appointment. She comes to my office because she is concerned that the spot never went away and now it is very sore and tender. A shave biopsy shows this to be ...

The time has come! I've passed boards, obtained my state license and I am scheduled to have ''temporary privileges'' at my facility next week! This is such an exciting time for my family and me! We've worked so hard for so many years and this is it. The really amusing thing? I opened the mail a couple of weeks ago when my license came through ...

The real tragedy of getting a medical education is not the understanding of your own mortality or quantification of personal risk factors. It's not even the fact that friends and colleagues want you to look at something awful that is growing out of their body (I was sure that was a myth). It is the loss of good television. An EMT friend of mine ...

I feel obligated to warn you. I normally don't use this blog for public service announcements but I learned of a disorder that all of you will suffer from, if you haven't already. The good news: it doesn't last forever and there is a treatment. I am talking about New Graduate Syndrome (NGS). It affects men and women of all ages after ...

As I approached high school graduation years ago, my Health Careers teacher shared the popular modern parable, Who Moved My Cheese? It is a story about mice and miniature people who look for cheese (a metaphor for happiness and success) in a maze. Silly, for sure, but I found that the story's lesson sticks its nose into my life on occasion. ...

Every day was Groundhog Day. Well, to be fair it was early January but, like the 1993 Bill Murray comedy, I felt like I was stuck in a time loop. The high of my graduation ceremony had worn off weeks ago, so I made like a retired snowbird and headed south to Florida for the winter. I camped at my mother's house while I waited for the next ...

Each month, ADVANCE for NPs & PAs compiles your comments on the latest issues in our Comments & Feedback column. We'd love to hear from you with topics of concern, the latest news for NPs & PAs, what your state organizations are up to, or anything else that piques your interest. Below are three of our latest Comments & ...

Was it losing weight? Spending more time with your family? Dragging your body to the gym? Reading more books? When's the last year you set a new year's resolution? And how far did you get before you broke it? And why are you so discouraged about trying again in 2013? We students in the medical field are required to study behavior change ...

On www.advanceweb.com/NPPA, our most commented articles were: Teams, Practice Models and Patients: ''As a full time clinician my team and I have been doing outcomes research on an interdisciplinary model of stroke rounds in an acute care setting. The four habits mentioned in this article we have used in our model. In fact I recently took a ...

''The first month of a job is the worst and you basically have that for a whole year.'' And that is how my friend described this next year of my life. November began the clinical year of PA school for me and she's not too far wrong in observing the first month at anything involves a learning curve -- like that of the horrors of Algebra I (the ...