by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Jun 27, 2019 | Fight the Good Fight, Healthcare Payment Policy
“The wounds with no name” (WWNN) are wounds that are due to trauma (not surgical complications) that never heal, PLUS the chronic ulcers that are NOT diabetic, arterial, venous or pressure related. These two groups (accidental wounds and ulcers which are not obviously...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Jun 24, 2019 | Don't Miss This
If you have been in wound care awhile, you know that a lot of it is pattern recognition. It’s a game of “duck, duck, goose.” I am not sure I would have figured these two cases out, except that I happened to be seeing both patients during the same time frame. That by...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Jun 17, 2019 | Don't Miss This
As any wound care practitioner knows, you can work your way through the Merck Manual of Rare Diseases every year because wounds are a SYMPTOM of disease. If there’s a rare condition, it will probably end up in the wound center. The question is whether we recognize it....
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Jun 14, 2019 | Don't Miss This
About four years ago I went to Thomazeau, Haiti with the organization Live Beyond. Just before I left, I received an email alert about a significant outbreak of Chikungunya disease. My response was the “Chicken-What?” I had never heard of it, although it affects...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Jun 12, 2019 | Pressure Cooker: Rethinking Pressure Ulcers
This pressure ulcer formed from the inside out on the right 5th MT head. The lesion evolved over 11 weeks. What do you think this means? If you saw the wound as it is on the photo to the right below, is there any intervention that would have prevented the development...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Jun 10, 2019 | Fight the Good Fight
It’s unlikely that a physician – no matter what their specialty is – can get through their professional career without being named in a medical malpractice lawsuit. My first malpractice lawsuit occurred when I was still in residency. I responded to a “code blue” in...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Jun 7, 2019 | Fight the Good Fight
Two weeks ago, on May 24th, my husband, Alan G. Moore, MD, died after a long battle with dementia. In 2009, during a complex surgical procedure, he found himself struggling to remember the steps of an operation he had performed hundreds of times. Neuro-psychometric...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | May 15, 2019 | Fight the Good Fight, Health Information Technology and Wound Care
The following patients with leg ulcers were referred to me (sometimes by the vein center) after undergoing venous ablation for documented venous reflux. The first is a 92 year old, alert little lady referred from a local vein center. A circumferential leg ulcer had...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Apr 17, 2019 | Fight the Good Fight, Health Information Technology and Wound Care
If you have been in wound care for any length of time, you have seen a patient like this. The local cancer is eradicated, and then we handle the aftermath. I tried to get a video of the day I could see her lung moving but it was a TINY little hole under the rib after...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Apr 11, 2019 | Fight the Good Fight, Health Information Technology and Wound Care
The video above depicts a 68 year old woman who had first noticed a lump in her breast 8 years earlier, but she did not seek treatment because she was overwhelmed with the death of her father and suffered a stroke due to a blood clot. She was placed on Coumadin for...
