jjablkowski's blog

Clinics across Canada are facing a problem. Thirty-eight percent of Canadians would rather their first point of contact for a doctor’s advice be over the phone, text, or on a video conference than the traditional in-person visit.[1]

While in-person visits may decrease, with new technology it’s easier than ever to add virtual care to your clinic’s toolbelt. Here are four things to do if you’re considering offering virtual care.

1. Choose a solution
Consider the following when choosing a virtual care provider. 

I love dictionaries. I have at least a dozen different ones, including several medical dictionaries. I cannot even lift my Random House Dictionary of the English Language, and my Canadian Oxford Dictionary is only a bit lighter. My favorite dictionaries are those that explain the origins of words. These include A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, Word Origins and their Romantic Stories, and Playboy’s Book of Forbidden Words (which explains, among other things, where the ubiquitous word that starts with F comes from).

Dr Mark Elliott’s article in the BCMJ’s January/February issue is an earnest, simplified, yet still confounding explanation of CRISPR,[1] an emerging genetic manipulation procedure for patients suffering from certain genetic mutations, including sickle cell anemia and thalassemia. The article is meant for nongeneticist physicians who wish to explain to enquiring patients what the CRISPR procedure is, what it can offer, and what are its practical, ethical, and legal limits.

A few weeks ago, while standing in a lineup for toilet tissue, my friend, standing 6 feet away, turned to me laughing, and said, “You know, in 1973 the comedian Johnny Carson read some false information about toilet paper shortages, and cracked a couple jokes about it on his Tonight Show.” In the following weeks customers flooded stores buying rolls and rolls of toilet paper, leaving empty shelves, which reinforced the rumor that the US was running out of toilet paper.

During my first few months of general practice in North Vancouver in the mid-1950s, one of the senior internal-medicine doctors asked me if I could make a daily short visit to one of his patients while he was away for couple of weeks. The patient was a young woman, slowly dying with mitral valve endocarditis. She was more or less isolated in an oxygen tent in the middle of a 10-bed ward waiting for her death. In those days there was not much more that could be done for her. The senior physician put his hand on my shoulder and said, “your visits will help her, use your bedside manner.”