Hospital Medicine
Physician discussions on inpatient care, transitions of care, diagnostic reasoning, and hospital-based protocols.
Recent Discussions
Do you perform a bone health assessment in men who will be receiving short term androgen deprivation for localized prostate cancer?
I do not order bone densitometry on patients I am treating with short term (<= 6 months) of AD, unless they have a risk factor like long-term glucocorticoid use or prior fracture. For patients I am treating with long term >=18 months I perform a baseline bone densitometry. If that is normal-mild ost...
What stage is bilateral orbital/conjunctival NHL (limited only to the bilateral orbit/conjunctiva)?
By the Ann Arbor staging system, this is stage IV disease because more than one extranodal site is involved at initial presentation. However, NCCN and other guidelines acknowledge that MALT lymphoma involving both paired organs (e.g., bilateral orbital/conjunctiva) is often best treated with RT alon...
How do you manage soft tissue necrosis in a patient who underwent TORS followed by RT?
Close observation Minimize trauma Don’t biopsy unless something very suspicious
How would you manage an elderly patient with GE junction adenocarcinoma who is not interested in surgery and who has ulcerative colitis (not currently on medication or symptomatic)?
Ulcerative colitis is generally a disease limited to the colon, and is an important distinction from Crohn's disease, which is truly anywhere from mouth to anus in the GI tract. These two diseases are on a spectrum of inflammatory bowel disease and there can be some overlap, but in general I would p...
For small peripherally located NSCLC, when do consider referral for mediastinal evaluation prior to curative surgery vs proceeding to resection with mediastinal eval at time of surgery?
Although there is variability among the different guidelines (ACCP, ESTS, NCCN) in regards to mediastinal staging, there is consensus that no invasive staging is required for peripheral nodules which are T1A (T1abcN0) given the low prevalence of occult N2 disease. Invasive mediastinal staging should...
Should breast cancer patients with never-treated latent TB and for whom chemotherapy is indicated be treated for latent TB during chemotherapy?
Interestingly latent tb reactivation while on cyclic combination Chemotherapy is quite rare even in endemic countries like India, including among patients treated for leukemia. This could be due to cyclic nature of immune suppression rather than chronic immune suppression which is required for tb re...
What is a safe time interval from completion of hormones and external beam radiation to TURP in patients who develop refractory obstruction?
Great question. Ordinarily, in my past experience, if a patient had real LUTS >14 AUA score that was not relieved with alpha blockers, and/or had a large median lobe, we would prefer the TURP be done upfront and / or chemical debulking with ADT too. In these instances, we found we had less LUTS then...
How do you approach rectal cancer with a solitary bone metastasis that is biopsy proven?
This is a much less common scenario than oligometastatic disease to the liver or lung, but as control rates for bone metastases treated with SBRT are showing promise, the approach may be similar to that taken for patients with more common sites of oligometastatic rectal cancer. We would typically st...
How long do you continue surveillance imaging for NSCLC after definitive treatment?
Theoretically, many of these patients would likely have the risk factors to qualify for ongoing low dose CT chest surveillance well after addressing their pulmonary malignancy.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21714641
When do you recommend patients get vaccinations with respect to their chemotherapy course?
It depends on the nature of the treatment program and on the patient’s immune system. For treatments that are not B-cell lymphodepleting, routine vaccinations can be administered routinely, presuming no underlying immunodeficiency. For patients receiving anti-CD20 monoclonal antibodies, we typically...